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This volume was left ready for the press by Dr. 
Manning. It needed no alteration or revision. We 
give it to the world as it is, the expression of his 
heart-life and ripe convictions. 



Not of Man but of God 



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^i" 



REV. J. M. MAMING D.D. 

AUTHUE OF " HALF TRUTHS AND THE TRUTH " 
" HELPS TO A LIFE OF PRAYER " ETC. 




BOSTON 

D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY 

30 and 32 Franklin Street 



^54 



<g & 



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Copyright, 

By D. Lothrop and Company 

1883. 



ELECTROTYPED. 



BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY, 
4 PeafwL Street. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 

THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE. ARGUMENT NOT NEEDED. 
RIGHT POINT OF VIEW ENOUGH. A STRONG STATEMENT. TRUTHS 
WHICH HAVE BEEN DOUBTED AS STOUTLY AS THE BIBLE. THE 
AXIOMS OF MATHEMATICS. NOT SURPRISING THAT THOSE WHO 
DOUBT AXIOMS DOUBT THE BIBLE. THAT YOU ARE A PERSON HAS 
BEEN DOUBTED. EXISTENCE OF GOD HAS BEEN DOUBTED. EXIST- 
ENCE OF AN OUTWARD WORLD DENIED. THE INFERENCE. LEGEND 
OF THE ROMAN SIBYL. WHAT YOU HAVE LOST OF THE BIBLE MAY 
BE RECOVERED ..... ... Page 1 



CHAPTER II. 



GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 

THEME RESTATED. NOT POSITIVELY PROVED. MAY BE TRUE, 
HOWEVER DOUBTED. GOD'S DESIRE IN THE CASE. OUR IDEA OF 
GOD. WHAT EARTHLY FATHERS DO. GOD YEARNS FOR HIS STRAY- 
ING CHILDREN. A MOTHER'S LOVE FOR US. GOD NOT TRUE TO HIS 
OWN NATURE IF NOT REVEALED. GOD'S COMPASSION MOVES HIM 
TO SHOW HIMSELF TO US. OUR SAD CASE WHILE STRAYING FROM 
HIM. THE CHILD WRETCHED APART FROM THE FATHER. HOW WE 
GO AFTER MEN IN ARCTIC SEAS. GOD WILL NOT LEAVE US TO 



Vi CONTENTS. 

PERISH. SHALL OUR INFINITE FATHER SEND NO LIFE-BOAT TO THE 
WRECKED SPIRIT WHICH IS HIS CHILD ? OUR SIN INTENSIFIES 
GOD'S DESIRE TO BE REVEALED TO US. GOD'S LOVE OF HOLINESS 
WILL NOT LET HIM STAY UNREVEALED. NATURE DOES NOT ADE- 
QUATELY REVEAL GOD. MANY THINGS IN NATURE AGAINST THE 
IMPRESSION GOD WOULD GIVE US OF HIMSELF. NATURE CANNOT 
REVEAL THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES OF GOD. GOD MUST SPEAK, AND 
PROVIDE MEN TO RECORD WHAT HE SAYS. GOD MUST COME IN 
THE FLESH TO BE PERFECTLY REVEALED. GOD'S CHARACTER OUR 
ASSURANCE THAT HE WILL COME TO US IN THE REVELATION WE 
NEED. OUR RELIEF AND BLESSEDNESS WHEN WE FIND THAT OUR 
INFINITE FATHER IS INDEED REVEALED TO US . . Page 16 



CHAPTER III. 

GOD CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 

CONCLUSION OF LAST CHAPTER. A DIVINE REVELATION NECES- 
SARILY MIRACULOUS. CAN GOD WORK A MIRACLE. THE ESSENTIAL 
IDEA OF A MIRACLE. OUR BIBLE MEETS THIS DEMAND FOR THE 
MIRACULOUS. ACCOUNTING FOR THE MIRACLES ON NATURAL PRIN- 
CIPLES. THIS TAKES AWAY WHAT IS INVOLVED IN THE IDEA OF A 
DIVINE REVELATION. HOW MEN AVOID REVEALING THEMSELVES. 
GOD MUST SHOW HIMSELF, OR HE COMES IN VAIN. NATURE NOT 
THE REVELATION GOD MOST DESIRES. A REVELATION OF GOD MUST 
BE GOD-LIKE, HENCE MIRACULOUS. OLD TESTAMENT MEETS THE 
DEMAND FOR MIRACLES. MIRACLES OF NEW TESTAMENT PROVE IT 
DrVINE. ST. PAUL TO AGRIPPA. CONCLUSION FROM MIRACLES. 
GOD KNEW THAT HE COULD CONTROL THE FORCES OF NATURE, OR 
HE WOULD NOT HAVE CREATED THEM. CONTRARY TO OUR IDEA 
OF GOD, THAT NATURE SHOULD KEEP HIM FROM HIS CHILDREN. 
GOD GLORIFIED IN WIELDING ALL NATURE FOR HIS HUMBLEST 
CHILD. THE FINITE MUST GUARD ITS RESOURCES. GOD NOT IM- 
POVERISHED BY GIVING. GOD CAN MAKE AND DESTROY WORLDS AS 
THEY HINDER OR WOULD HELP HIS LOVE. GOD WILL DO ANY 
MIRACLE RATHER THAN BE KEPT FROM HIS CHILDREN. THE FORM 
OF THE MIRACULOUS OR SUPERNATURAL MAY CHANGE. MIRACLES 
HAVE CEASED ONLY IN A LIMITED SENSE. THE FORM OF THE 



CONTENTS. Vil 

.1TVINE REVELATION MEETS THE HUMAN NEED. CIVILIZATION 
GLORIES ONLY AS GOD IS IN IT. THE STILL SMALL VOICE. AL- 
MIGHTY POWER WIELDED BY PERFECT LOVE . , Page 31 



CHAPTER IV. 

INSPIRATION. 

NEED OF INSPIRATION. ELSE NO WRITTEN REVELATION. IF 
INSPIRATION NEEDED, NO NEED OF BIBLE. WORD OF GOD. AN 
INSPIRATION WHICH IS NATURAL. MAY DIMLY REFLECT THE SUPER- 
NATURAL. MEN THUS INSPIRED NOT GOD'S ACCREDITED MESSEN- 
GERS. NOT A RESPECTER OF PERSONS. GOD MORE MANIFEST AS 
THE INSTRUMENT IS WEAKER. WRITERS OF THE BIBLE NOT THE 
ONLY MEN GOD HAS INSPIRED. TEST OF INSPIRATION. BIBLE 
PASSES THE TEST. BIBLE SPEAKS OF DIVINE WORDS NOT RE- 
CORDED. RELIEVED BY ADMITTING OTHER REVELATIONS. WHAT 
IS NOT INSPIRED NOT FROM GOD. ONLY WHAT COMES FROM GOD 
CAN REVEAL HIM. LOST TRAVELLERS. WHAT WE ALL NEED. 
NONE WHOM GOD HAS NOT SENT CAN HELP US. WHAT CLAIM THE 
BIBLE MAKES. GOD SPEAKS AND MEN PUBLISH. GOD IN THE 
MOSAIC DISPENSATION. GOD IN THE CHRISTIAN DISPENSATION. 
THE DEMAND FOR INSPIRATION VERY URGENT. INSPIRATION THE 
ANCHOR OF OUR HOPE Page 46 

CHAPTER V. 

THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 

THE POINT NOW REACHED. THE BIBLE MEETS OUR DEMAND FOR 
MIRACLES. ARE ITS WRITERS TO BE BELIEVED ? WITNESS OF 
CONTEMPORARY HISTORY. TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS. THE MOABITE 
STONE. INSPIRED HISTORY CONFIRMED. BIBLE A GUIDE-BOOK TO 
EGYPT. ASSYRIAN REMAINS CONFIRM BIBLE RECORDS. BIBLICAL 
AND ASSYRIAN ANNALS COMPARED. DURING AND AFTER THE CAP- 
TIVITY. WHAT ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXPECT. THE OLD TESTAMENT 
CONFIRMED BY THE NEW. WITNESSES TO NEW TESTAMENT. IGNA- 
TIUS. POLYCARP AND OTHERS. NO ROOM FOR MYTHOLOGY. 



Viii CONTENTS. 

WHAT THE WRITERS CLAIMED. HOW BELIEVED BY CONTEMPO- 
RARIES. THE ROMAN CATACOMBS. THE GEOGRAPHY OF PALESTINE 
A WITNESS. THE TESTIMONY SURPRISING IN AMOUNT. THE ENE- 
MIES OF CHRIST WITNESS FOR HIM. THE DREAM OF PILATE'S 
WIFE. THE DAMSEL WITH THE SPIRIT OF DIVINATION Page 62 

CHAPTER VI. 

TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 

A RECAPITULATION. THE WRITERS OF THE BIBLE FALSE WIT- 
NESSES IF NOT INSPIRED. THE CLAIM WHICH CHRIST MAKES. 
PROMISE OF CHRIST TO THOSE WHO SHOULD RECORD HIS WORDS. 
WHAT THE APOSTLES CLAIM. NATURE OF PROPHECY. ONLY FUL- 
FILLED TO BE CONSIDERED. FULFILMENT OF PROPHECIES CON- 
CERNING ISRAEL. WHAT WAS SAID TO ABRAHAM AT BETHEL. 
THE BONDAGE IN EGYPT FORETOLD. WHAT BALAAM PREDICTED. 
PROPHECY OF THE DECLINE OF ISRAEL. THE CAPTIVITY. THE 
DOOM OF TYRE. EGYPT. BABYLON. THE FATE OF JERUSALEM. 
PREDICTIONS CONCERNING CHRIST. FIFTY-THIRD OF ISAIAH. RE- 
JECTION OF CHRIST BY THE JEWS FORETOLD. SIXTY-SECOND OF 
ISAIAH AND FOURTH OF LUKE. JOEL AND THE DAY OF PENTE- 
COST. PROPHECY AND APOSTOLIC HISTORY. TRIBUTE OF HAL- 
LAM Page 78 

CHAPTER VII. 

WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 

POWER OF THE BIBLE AMONG MEN. LIKE THE RIVER NILE. 
OTHER ANCIENT BOOKS INFERIOR. BUT ONE NEW TESTAMENT. 
THE BIBLE WITHOUT EARTHLY PRESTIGE. BIBLE COMPARED WITH 
HUMAN CLASSICS. A SOURCE OF OTHER BOOKS. ATTACKS ON THE 
BIBLE. DEFENDERS AND EXPOUNDERS. THE BIBLE AND SECULAR 
LITERATURE. WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE FOR ART. PAINTING. 
MUSIC. WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE IN SOCIETY. THE BIBLE IN 
NORTHERN EUROPE. THE RED MAN NOT AN EXCEPTION. SAND- 
WICH ISLANDS. MADAGASCAR. FIJI ISLANDS. MUTINEERS OF SHIP 
BOUNTY. THE BIBLE SHOWN TO BE GOD'S BOOK. INFERENCE 
FROM THIS SURVEY OF HISTORY ...... Page 94 



CONTENTS. IX 

CHAPTER VIII. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 

ARGUMENT FOR DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE ALREADY SUFFI- 
CIENT. OTHER EVIDENCE INTERNAL RATHER THAN EXTERNAL. 
WHAT IS MAN ? MAN A SPIRIT. CONVICTION OF THE SOUL CON- 
CERNING ITSELF. THE BIBLE ANSWERS TO OUR UNEASY CONVIC- 
TION. WHAT WAS SAID AT MAN'S CREATION. THE BIBLE CONFIRMS 
AND EXPLAINS OUR CONVICTIONS. MAN SPIRITUAL AND DIVINE. 
THE BIBLE INSISTS MORE AND MORE ON THIS FROM BEGINNING 
TO END. NO OTHER BOOK SHEDS SUCH LIGHT. IDEA OF IMMOR- 
TALITY IN THE BIBLE AS IN THE SOUL. THE BIBLE GIVES THE 
IDEA A VOICE. HOW MEN CAME TO DOUBT THEIR IMMORTALITY. 
ONLY EFFACED IN SAVAGE MINDS. THE BIBLE MEETS OUR HIGH- 
EST THOUGHT. WHY GRADUALLY REVEALED. NECESSARY INFER- 
ENCE. WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF A FALL IN MAN. MEN KNOW 
THEY ARE FALLEN APART FROM THE BIBLE. HUMAN SOCIETY 
ASSUMES THAT MAN IS FALLEN. THE BIBLE AGREES WITH ALL 
EXPERIENCE. GOD REVEALED IN THE SELF-REVELATION. A PRAC- 
TICAL LESSON FOR THE READER Page 112 

CHAPTER IX. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 

INTERNAL EVIDENCE CONTINUED. HOW GOD IS PORTRAYED IN 
THE BIBLE. EXISTENCE OF GOD ASSUMED. NOT ARGUMENT, BUT 
PERCEPTION, WHAT ATHEISTS NEED. EXISTENCE OF GOD ABOVE 
FORMAL PROOF. SIN A SOURCE OF DOUBT. COLD REASONING 
REPELS. BIBLE SPEAKS TO THE LATENT BELIEF IN A GOD. BIBLE 
DOES NOT IMPLANT, BUT GUIDES, THE LONGING FOR GOD. A VOICE 
TO WHAT IS DUMB WITHIN US. THE BIBLE INSISTS ON THE FATH- 
ERHOOD OF GOD. AWAKES THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THIS FATHER- 
HOOD. FAITH BEFORE DOUBT. TRUE FATHERHOOD IMPLIES 
JUSTICE. THE GOD OF THE BIBLE MEETS THE YLARNING FOR A 



X CONTENTS. 

FATHER. THE TRUTH GRADUALLY MANIFESTED. THE PERFECT SON 
REVEALS THE FATHERHOOD. THE BIBLE FULL OF THIS GOD. FIND 
MORE OF GOD THE MORE WE FATHOM SCRIPTURE. THE BIBLE 
BINDS MEN TO GOD. GOD THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF SCRIPTURE. 
THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS OUR CHIEF JOY. A WITNESS TO 

god's love Pnge 129 

CHAPTER X. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 

THE PHRASE "MORAL ORDER" TO BE DEFINED. AN INSTANCE 
OF PHYSICAL ORDER. THE LAW OF MORAL ORDER. THE SOUL 
RECOGNIZES THIS LAW. THE QUESTION. THE BIBLE ANSWERS TO 
OUR CONVICTIONS. BIBLE HISTORY FULL OF THE LAW OF MORAL 
ORDER. ALLOWANCE FOR HUMAN WEAKNESS. CHRIST THE PERFECT 
INSTANCE. THE SAME LAW IN BOTH THE PERFECT AND IMPERFECT. 
GOD'S MOTIVE IN CREATION. ONE MORAL LAW FOR GOD AND MEN. 
WHY GOD IS NOT TEMPTED TO EVIL. WHY MEN DO EVIL. RESULT 
IF GOD SHOULD DO WRONG. WHY GOD IS BLESSED. HOW MEN 
SHARE HIS BLESSEDNESS. NO BLESSEDNESS BUT IN RIGHTEOUS- 
NESS. THE WAGES OF SIN. ORIGIN OF EVIL A MYSTERY. THE 
BIBLE ACCOUNT THE CLEAREST WE HAVE. SIN NECESSARILY 
PUNISHED. PUNISHMENT NOT ARBITRARY. OUR HEARTS RESPOND 
TO WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF RETRIBUTION. FAITHFULNESS OF 
GOD. TENDERNESS OF CHRIST. IT MUST BE GOD WHO SPEAKS SO 
TRULY AND PROFOUNDLY OF WHAT IS IN MEN . . Page 145 



CHAPTER XL 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 

TRUTHS ALREADY KNOWN WHICH THE BIBLE MAKES CLEAR. 
MAN. GOD. MORAL ORDER. THE WHOLLY NEW TRUTH OF SCRIP- 
TURE. BEYOND THE REACH OF WORDS. REDEMPTION PECULIARLY 
A BIBLE THEME. A RELIEF TO TROUBLED MINDS. THE QUESTION 
WHICH ONLY GOD CAN ANSWER. ANNOUNCEMENT OF REDEMPTION 
GIVES THE BIBLE ITS UNIQUE VALUE. THE CROSS CENTRAL IN 



CONTENTS. x \ 

SCRIPTURE. OUR GREAT WANT, NOT KNOWING BUT HEALING. MAX 
HAS NEVER MET THE CASE. HE WHO SPEAKS IN THE BIBLE BRINGS 
HEALING. A REDEMPTION NOT OF MAN FILLS SCRIPTURE. THEO- 
RIES OF ATONEMENT UNSATISFYING. BLESSEDNESS OF THE FACT. 
WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW. CAN WE ESCAPE REMORSE ? NOT 
THROUGH MAN. A GOD-MAN CALLED FOR. HOW OUR DIVINE 
MEDIATOR SAVES. WHY THE CROSS IS AN OFFENCE TO MANY. 
HOW THE OFFENCE IS REMOVED. ALL-SUFFICIENCY OF CHRIST. 
CHRIST PLANTS HIS OWN LIFE IN MAN. THE STORY OF REDEMP- 
TION GOD'S SEAL. A LOVING WORD TO THE READER. Page 160 



CHAPTER XII. 

WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 

ONE OTHER QUESTION TO BE CONSIDERED. CAUSES OF DOUBT 
GENERAL AND SPECIAL. WORLDLY MINDEDNESS. DIVINE THINGS 
UNREAL. THE WORLD ALL ABSORBING. WE BECOME LIKE THAT 
TO WHICH WE GIVE OURSELVES. THE TWO DOORS. BEING EAGER 
FOR THE TEMPORAL, WE DOUBT THE ETERNAL. DTJLNESS OF THE 
SPIRITUAL PERCEPTIONS A CAUSE OF DOUBT. THE BLIND MAN'S 
IDEA OF COLOR. OUR SPIRITUAL DEFECT TO BE CONSIDERED. 
MANY FORMS OF WORLDLINESS. THE LIFE OF GROSS EARTHLINESS 
ONLY ONE FORM. SPIRITUAL PERCEPTIONS DEADENED BY SECU- 
LAR ENGROSSMENT. SCIENCE MAY BE A FORM OF EARTHLINESS. 
HOW SCIENTIFIC STUDIES MAY LEAD TO DOUBT. HOW THE MASSES 
OF MEN CAME TO DOUBT THE BIBLE. DISTRUST OF THE BIBLE CAN 
BE REMOVED. THE CAUSE OF DOUBT SHOWS THE REMEDY. SPIR- 
ITUAL QUICKENING THE GREAT NEED. THE LIFE OF GOD IN 
THE SOUL THE REMEDY FOR DOUBT. RELIGIOUS DOUBT SHOWS 
A NARROW MAN. HOW ABLE THINKERS MAY DOUBT. THE MEN 
OF FAITH. OPENNESS OF SOUL TO THE RENEWING SPIRIT. FAITH 
A PLANT OF GRADUAL GROWTH. OBEDIENCE THE NURSE OF 

FAITH. HOW TO DRINK THE LIVING WATER . . Page 176 



NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 



CHAPTER I. 

ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 

Nothing can be more sure than that God has 
spoken to men, and that our Bible is such a record 
as we need of what he has said. The whole Bible 
is, in this view of it, the theme not only of this 
opening chapter, but of those which may follow 
it in the present volume. It is in Christ's stead, 
my dear friend, that I ask you to spend a little 
while with me in considering what the proofs are 
of the divine origin of Scripture. 

No doubt you will be surprised to hear me say 
that I propose to prove that our Bible is a message 
to us from God, when I tell you, as I now frankly 
do, that my mind instinctively recoils from any 
such proposal. My first feeling in regard to it 
is that it is irreverent ; that it is a profane attempt 
to prove what is above all proof; that it is pre- 
suming to put on trial what prophet and psalmist 
and apostle and our Lord Jesus Christ all assume 
to be true. Let me say, then, that I do not 

1 



2 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOT). 

propose to put our Bible on trial, but rather to 
withdraw it from the trial on which others have 
thoughtlessly or in their blindness put it. The 
truth of the Bible will be as clear to us as the 
sun, if we come back to the spiritual nature in 
us ; if from that point of view we candidly look 
at it, and pay no attention to the intricate and be- 
wildering arguments which men have constructed, 
whether for or against it. All truth has a self- 
evidencing power when we are set face to face 
with it, and candidly look at it from the right 
point of view. I hope to bring you to that point, 
and there leave you to judge for yourself, if any 
doubt such as is sometimes put in our way, or 
arises in our minds, has caused you to look with 
suspicion on this most blessed and divine gift, — 
our Bible, the book of books. 

Let me repeat the words with which I began i 
" Nothing can be more sure than that God has 
spoken to men, and that our Bible is such a 
record as we need of what he has said." This 
statement may not cover all the ground which we 
need to go over, for God reveals himself in what 
he does no less than in what he says ; but it will 
answer for a beginning. ?e But is not that a pretty 
strong statement, altogether too strong, which you 
make in saying that nothing else can be more sure 
than the Bible ? " As likely as not you toss me 
this question on the very start ; yet I take back 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 3 

nothing ; I do not qualify or limit what I have said. 
The statement cannot be too strong. I intended 
to make it as strong as possible. "Nothing else 
can be more sure," is my assertion, and to it I 
mean to adhere. "What," you say, "as sure as 
our own existence?" Certainly. "As sure as that 
there are stars in the sky, and a moon, and a sun?" 
Certainly. " As sure as that there is a solid earth 
under us with cities and people and trees and ani- 
mals upon it, and streams and seas with fishes in 
them?" Certainly. "Do you mean to say that the 
Bible is as surely true as it is true that two and 
two are equal to four, or that the angles in a square 
figure are right angles?" Certainly. "But," you 
say, " the truth of the Bible has been questioned ; 
and who ever questioned the truths of pure math- 
ematics, or his own existence, or the facts of an 
external world?" Who? Dear friend, I can give 
you a plenty of names of men who have doubted 
mathematical and material certainties just as much 
as anybody ever doubted the divine origin of the 
Bible. And here I come to just the point which I 
wish to present in this chapter. 

All that people have said or are now saying 
about the Bible not being true does not prove that 
it is not true. Let us trace the analogy or parallel 
a little way, — just enough to scatter any haze of 
suspicion or doubt which may have begun to gather 
in your mind concerning the Bible. 



4 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

We will take first the analogy of mathematics. 
You believe that two dollars and two dollars are 
equal to four dollars, do you not ? * r Oh, yes. " Your 
experience has taught you that. Let some one who 
owes you the two and two dollars try to prove that 
they together make only three dollars, and then see. 
The two and two are the parts, and the four is their 
sum, and }'our arithmetic and algebra tell you of 
a mathematical axiom by which the whole of any- 
thing and all its parts are equal. Axioms ! Do 
you know, my dear friend, that there are men who 
deny the truth of such things as axioms ? You 
are perfectly sure, if you cut an apple into any 
number of parts, that all the parts together will 
just equal the apple. But there are men who are 
not sure. They deny everything of the sort, and 
they defy you to prove it. Only a few years ago 
an Englishman died who would have met you at 
just this point, and would have told you that it 
had not been satisfactorily proved to his mind that 
two and two are equal to four, or that there are any 
axioms or self-evident truths. And that man was 
not a dunce. He was one of the most learned and 
profound thinkers that England ever had. The 
name of that man is very familiar to you. You 
have often heard ambitious lecturers quote it on 
the lyceum platform, much as if he were a per- 
sonal friend of theirs ; it was John Stuart Mill. He 
was so great a man that almost all England felt 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 5 

honored when he once consented to be chosen a 
member of her parliament. Yet this man, in the 
crowning effort of his life, in his work on Logic, 
consisting of three stately volumes, greatly admired 
for their clear style and subtle thought, affirms that 
for aught we know to the contrary two and two 
may make five in some other world. He says that 
two and two do not necessarily make four. We 
wrongly infer that they do, because we have always 
seen them doing it. Some time we may see differ- 
ently, and then we shall be tempted to make a dif- 
ferent inference. We should not make any infer- 
ence. All we can truly say is that so far as our 
experience goes two and two make four ; it is not 
true that of themselves they always necessarily do 
this. 

Now the man who was not sure at this point, of 
course was not sure at a great many other points. 
He saw no proof that the soul lives after the death 
of the body, no proof of the obligations of moral- 
ity. Religion and government were to him only a 
kind of expediency, and merely provisional at that. 
But when such a man as that says that the Bible 
has not been proved true, or when any of his pre- 
tentious imitators say it, I think we have no occa- 
sion to be disturbed or unsettled in our minds. 
Very likely if you had gone to him and heard him 
talk in his wise way on the subject of axioms, you 
would have been caught in the meshes of his rea- 



6 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

soning, and would have come away doubting that 
there are any axioms. Yet nothing can be more 
certain than they. And hence, when men doubt 
the divine origin of the Bible, and entangle you in 
their doubts, it may nevertheless be as sure that 
God has spoken to us in that sacred volume as that 
two and two make four. If the keenest thinkers 
can doubt the certainty of the laws of mathemat- 
ics, be not surprised when you stumble on doubts 
concerning the Bible, whether in other men's minds 
or your own. The fault is not in the Bible, but 
in those who doubt. Some mental eccentricity, or 
wrong point of view, or unsuspected power of sin 
in them, warps their judgment. The fact that Mr. 
Mill and his followers doubt the axioms in your 
arithmetic does not cause you to throw your arith- 
metic away ; and so you have no cause to throw 
away your Bible, or to be at all anxious lest it 
should turn out untrue, though there may be many 
around you who deny that it came from God. I 
come back, then, to the point from which I set out, 
and I still affirm as stoutly as ever that nothing, not 
even mathematical axioms, can be more sure than 
that God has spoken to men and given us an ade- 
quate record thereof in our Bible. Men can doubt 
anything however sure, if they try to, or in cer- 
tain morbid states of mind. Why should we be 
alarmed, then, when they doubt the Bible? 

There is one thing, dear friend, of which I 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 7 

know that you are perfectly certain ; that is your 
own personal existence. You say that to doubt it 
would be the height of absurdity, and you won- 
deringly ask me if I ever heard of a person who 
doubted his own existence. Most certainly I 
have, dear friend. I have heard of a great many, 
and some of them were very distinguished men 
in their way. The}' were not what we call crazy 
persons, but wholly sane and full of fine mental 
energy. Yet they doubted their personal existence. 
You behold, then, what a sea you are sailing out 
upon, if you let yourself be led away by those 
who distrust the Bible. The sea of doubt is a 
troubled and shoreless sea. You may begin the 
voyage, but you will never end it save by return- 
ing to the point from which you set out. You 
say, " I hear these men affirming that the Bible is 
not God's book, and they are scholarly, honest, 
manly men. I think I will go with them a little, 
as something in me prompts me to do." But you 
forget what a terrible journey of unbelief you are 
entering upon. As they doubt the Bible, and try 
to make you believe' their doubt, so, as we have 
seen, there are others still who doubt axioms and 
try to make them believe that doubt ; and others 
still who doubt their personal existence, and will 
fortify this last doubt with many plausible argu- 
ments. Do you ask me to name one of the men 
who have carried their skepticism to this absurd 



8 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

extreme? Well, there are a great many of them, 
eminent men, scholars, poets, profound thinkers, 
who have made and are still making a great deal 
of stir in the world, I will name one, who seems 
to me to have been the foremost of those in mod- 
ern times who have gone away into this kind of 
unbelief. His name was Benedict Spinoza, and he 
was what is usually called a pantheist. Pantheism, 
as the word implies, is the doctrine that God in- 
cludes all real existence within himself. Nothing 
but God, that is, really exists, You and I have 
no right to think of ourselves as persons, for we 
are not persons. We are only emanations of God, 
and are still a part of him, just as the solar rays 
are a part of the sun, as the ripples are a part 
of the brook on which we see them. Our whole 
life is only an illusion, a dream, a fancy, the emp- 
tiest and vainest of deceptions. In all the uni- 
verse there is nothing but God, and he is the 
universe. You and I and all other beings and 
objects are literally nothing, only as the drops of 
rain or the snowflakes which sink into the ocean 
out of which they came. You may have read 
some of the books of the German author Goethe ; 
he was very much of this way of thinking. You 
are familiar with Mr. Carlyle's works, with Mr. 
Emerson's ; they, too, think very much as Goethe 
thought. So you see, surprising as it is that a 
man should doubt his own personal existence, there 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. y 

are men who do* it. And they are not stupid and 
foolish men. They are men who have many dis- 
ciples, and whom multitudes very much admire. 
But I think most men and women are pretty thor- 
oughly persuaded of their own existence, notwith- 
standing all this doubt which has been thrown upon 
the subject. It is as large a mass of doubt as that 
which has been thrown around the Bible, and it 
comes for the most part from a far more respect- 
able source. 7 think, then, if such solid facts as our 
own personal existence may be brought into doubt 
by those who follow their imagination and their 
logic, we had better not grow suspicious of our 
Bibles because they, too, are doubted. We had 
better hold on to them, and be firm in the faith 
that they are God's message to us, till we find 
other grounds of distrust for them than those 
which lead on to the denial of anything and every- 
thing. 

Let us look at another fact, the most solemn 
and blessed, as it is to me the most certain of all 
things, — I mean our God himself, — let us look and 
see how even his existence has been doubted. We 
have just seen that one class of doubters make him 
the only real thing, declaring that men and worlds 
are but illusive emanations from him constantly 
falling back into him. Now we look on another 
class who take just the opposite extreme, deny- 
ing that there is a God, and asserting that the 



10 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

only real thing is matter. Matter, they say, was 
not created, but is self-existent, eternal. The 
universe is a universe of material forces. Matter, 
taking shape and moving by virtue of its own in- 
herent laws, has given us what we call mind and 
spirit, — the ideas out of which each man imagines 
his own God, and so on. Yet our assurance that 
there is a God comes with us into life. It is part 
of the very make-up of the human soul. Only 
sin and ignorance and worldliness can obscure it. 
The more pure in heart we are, the more dis- 
tinctly we see God. And now behold how this 
precious and sacred verity has been brought into 
doubt. Men have not been content simply to be- 
lieve in God, but have tried to find him out, to 
comprehend him, to understand him. And they 
have been so baffled in what they have tried to do 
as first to doubt that there is a God, and then to 
deny his existence altogether. Do you wonder, 
then, that men are found who doubt the Bible? 
What is more sure than the existence of God, 
whose existence so many have denied ? And there- 
fore nothing may be more sure than that the Bible 
is God's book, though some say it is not. Two 
and two make four, though Stuart Mill doubts it. 
We have each a personal existence, though Spi- 
noza says we have not. There is a God, however 
much men may deny all things but matter. And so 
all the doubts which men have had concerning the 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 11 

Bible do not prove that it is untrue. In the midst 
of all these doubts it may be just as sure as that 
there are axioms, that you and I are persons, that 
God exists. You see, then, what a Protean thing 
doubt is. It is all the time changing into some- 
thing else while you try to lay hold of it. When 
you doubt your Bible you have simply gone 
down one step of the stairway. There is another 
step below that, then another, and then another ; 
nor can you stop till you doubt the trustworthi- 
ness of your own faculties, and conclude, even if 
there be such a thing as truth anywhere, that it is 
not possible for you ever to find it. 

What is more sure to you than the solid earth 
on which you walk, the brooks which warble at 
your feet, the woods lifting their glorious arches 
and chanting a perpetual anthem all through their 
solemn aisles ? And yet, dear friend, there have 
been, and still are, men who doubt the reality of 
an external world. "What a strange doubt," 
you say. It is strange, but it is by no means 
uncommon. There are many men now living, in 
this country and elsewhere, who will tell you that 
they believe in ideas, in the sensations and expe- 
riences of their own minds, but the existence of 
matter, of anything external to them, is yet to be 
proved. There was not long ago in Germany a 
man named Hegel who taught something of this 
sort, and he has to-day many disciples. He 



12 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

would tell you that your own thinking is all 
which makes anything real to you. For you 
there is an outward world only because you think 
there is. You make your own world, your own 
God, your own friends, and wealth and poverty, 
by your thinking. Cease to think that they are 
yours, and so far as you are concerned they have 
no longer any existence. There are men now 
living, whose names you have heard so often that 
I will not repeat them, who say that we can never 
know anything outside of ourselves. We can 
know what we inwardly experience, — our sensa- 
tions, our thoughts, or feelings and desires, and 
that is all. Even our sensations are limited to 
appearances, constantly changing phenomena ; 
they never extend to the fixed substances, the 
underlying causes of things. You think you put 
a real coal of fire to some real gunpowder, and 
that you thereupon see a real Hash, of which the 
fire is the cause. But this is only your own 
thinking; it took place wholly within yourself; 
it proves nothing outside of you. You have no 
right to say that the coal caused the flash, or that 
there was any flash, or powder, or fire ; you know 
only what took place in your own mind, how it 
seemed to you, what your impressions were. 
"Silly men," you say, rf to doubt what is so real." 
Yet they will argue very acutely and very plau- 
sibly to establish their doubt. If you read their 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 13 

books much, or hear them lecture, or talk with 
them, just as likely as not you will forget your 
own common sense, and be led on step by step 
into their subtleties till you are just as much in 
doubt of an external world as they are. 

You see, then, what a large number of perfectly 
sure things there are which you can come to be in 
doubt of, if you once let yourself fall into the 
habit of doubting. You can doubt that there is 
any material world about you, that there is any 
God, that you are yourself a real person ; you can 
doubt that there are any such things as axioms in 
mathematics, that your own faculties of mind are 
trustworthy. And all along in this process of 
doubting you will find yourself, speaking after the 
manner of men, in very good company. Surely, 
then, my dear friend, you will not conclude that 
the Bible is untrue, even if you should hear a 
great many learned and ingenious men say that it 
is. According to all analogy, as we have just 
seen, a great many things may be true which 
learned and ingenious men doubt. Are you pre- 
pared to go all lengths with such men? They 
will not deny to you the divine origin of the Bible 
any more than they will deny a hundred other 
most real and precious things. Doubt is like that 
fire sometimes seen in low, swampy places by 
night, which leads away those who follow it till 
they are lost and perish. When you quit your 



14 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Bible, no longer believing it to be the sure word 
of God, and choose the path of doubt, experience 
writes, " All hope abandon, ye who enter here," 
over the gate by which } r ou start into that path. 

You have heard the story of the Sibyl who came 
to one of the early Roman kings with the prophetic 
books. She offered to sell them to him, but asked 
a very high price, which he refused to pay, where- 
upon she went off and burnt a portion of them. 
Then she came back to the king and offered him 
what were left; but he again refused, and again 
she went and burnt some more of them. Again 
the third time she came back, now bringing only 
three books of the nine she had first brought, still 
urging the king to buy them, and demanding the 
original price. Her strange behavior induced him to 
accept her terms ; otherwise the whole of the Sibyl- 
line books, afterwards so dear to the Eoman 
people, would have been lost. Thus it is, dear 
friend, that certain great truths, — the Bible, your 
own existence, God, things which are self-evident, 
— come to you. You can have them all by believ- 
ing, and by doubting you can lose them all. If 
you have already doubted some of them, stop 
where you are, as the Roman king at length 
stopped, and retrace your way to the point at 
which you began to doubt, that all the treasures 
may still be yours ; for these great truths are not 
like the Sibyl's books, — they have not been 



ANYTHING MAY BE DOUBTED. 15 

burnt, nor can they be destroyed, and however 
you may have let go your hold on any of them, 
they will come back to you through Him in whom 
all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid. 
Be not disturbed by any voices of doubt concern- 
ing the Bible, since those same voices would lead 
you on to doubt w T hat is truest and most precious 
in life ; but in the midst of them all, with a vast 
multitude of the best and greatest men, and in 
obedience to the central instinct of your own soul, 
still say : w Nothing can be more sure than that 
God has spoken to men, and that our Bible is such 
a record as we need of what he has said." 



CHAPTER II. 

GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 

" Nothing can be more sure than that God has 
spoken to men, and that our Bible is such a record 
as we need of what he has said." 

I do not pretend that this statement was posi- 
tively proved in what I said concerning it in the 
chapter before this. But I think some steps were 
taken in the way to positive proof. At least it 
was shown, I think, that we have no more reason 
to doubt the Bible on account of what has been 
said against it than we have to doubt what are 
known as absolute certainties on account of what 
has been said against them. It does not shake our 
faith in the mathematical axioms that two and two 
are equal to four, and the whole of anything is 
equal to the sum of all its parts, because certain 
philosophers have denied that such axioms are 
necessarily true. It has been stoutly denied that 
we have any personal existence, yet w^e know that 
we have. It has been ingeniously argued that w r e 
cannot prove an external world, yet we know that 
such a world exists. Some have claimed that mat- 
ter is the only reality, yet we know that there are 
ideas and spirit. Others have claimed that ideas 
16 



GOD DESTJRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 17 

are all there is, yet we know that besides these 
there is both spirit and matter. Seeing how all 
these solid realities have been doubted, we are not 
disposed to cast away our Bibles on account of 
what has been said against them. 

I now take up another point, which is, that God 
must needs desire to reveal himsef to men, and 
to provide for an authentic record of that revela- 
tion. Can you think of anything more strange 
than that God should shut himself away from men, 
and really choose to have nothing more to do with 
them? Consider what our idea of God is, — that 
necessary idea of Him which we all bring with us 
into life. He is our Father. That word " Father " 
comes the nearest of any, perhaps, to a full expres- 
sion of his character ; yet we must add other words 
in order to get the whole. Think what an earthly 
father is, — one who fills out the meaning of the 
word. Does he willingly let his children get 
separated from, and allow all intercourse between 
them and him to cease? Certainly not. He 
knows that they are dependent on him, and he 
wishes to provide for their daily wants ; he knows 
that temptations to evil are all around them, and 
he wishes to save them out of those temptations ; 
he knows that they are often disinclined to strug- 
gle up the hard path of virtue and truth, and he 
wishes to stimulate them and cheer them on in 
that path. Now take this good earthly father, 



18 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

and imagine all his love for his children infinitely 
increased, and you come to our idea of what God 
is to all men. What is the earthly father's love to 
the heavenly Father's ? If the earthly father so 
clings to his children, is loth to be separated from 
them, does not forget them but often visits them 
after they have gone out from under his roof, shall 
the heavenly Father wholly leave His children to 
themselves? Shall he stop all intercourse with 
us, send us no message, not even a letter to 
assure us of his remembrance and love? Cer- 
tainly this would be strange. Nothing could be 
stranger. We must give up that necessary idea 
which we have of God as a Father, and think of 
him as more heartless than the worst earthly 
parent can be, if he never has any wish to speak 
to us or to have us come near to him. 

God is not only the ideal and infinite Father, 
but all the elements of a true motherhood are in 
him. Thus we think of him. Such is the idea 
of him with which we are born into the world. 
Let a mother's child be separated from her, and 
let her fear that he may be lost. What is there 
that she will not do to recover him? To what 
part of the world will she not go, what pleasures 
not give up, what dangers and hardships not en- 
counter? Her reason goes out of her when all 
hope that she shall again see her child or know 
his fate is at an end. Most surely, then, arguing 



GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 19 

from what God is, from what we know that he 
must be, it would be a wholly strange and unac- 
countable thing that he should not desire to reveal 
himself to men. Do you expect the father and 
mother to go after their lost children? to write 
them loving letters of sympathy, counsel, and 
warning, when they are away at school or trying 
to take care of themselves in life ? Certainly you 
expect it of them. And you cannot expect any- 
thing less from God. You naturally expect a 
great deal more from him : more thoughtful- 
ness, more heart-yearning, more sending, and 
writing, and coming, and doing, — infinitely more. 
How strange a thing that God should put us here 
in this world, and then desire to have no more 
intercourse with us ! 

But this desire of God to be revealed to us 
must be vastly stronger in view of our sore need 
of such a revelation. Not only has he the fatherly 
and motherly feeling, but the sentiment of pity in 
him is infinite. We are more than his children ; 
we are his estranged and sinning children. If 
there is no other eye to pity, surely he will pity ; 
he will save if there be no other arm to save. 
He sees how unhappy we are amid the things of 
the world, with which we seek to please our- 
selves. Our consciences trouble us ; we have 
fearful apprehensions of evil to come ; we are 
full of unrest, yearning discontentedly for we can 



20 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

hardly tell what, amid all earthly joys. He 
knows that this wretchedness in us may go on 
increasing till it shall become a fiery and endless 
torture. And this misery is due to our separation 
from him. There is a child-nature in us answer- 
ing to the fatherhood in him. It is this divine 
nature in us which makes us so wretched amid 
worldly delights. It lives on, a kind of living 
death, — dead, yet groaning, in the midst of tres- 
passes and sins. It cries out, though with a be- 
wildered, unknowing cry, for the living God. 
Shall that image of God in us, that spirit which 
he breathed into man at the beginning, be recov- 
ered to him while it is capable of such return, or 
shall it be let alone till it cannot possibly be 
brought back? Surely, we say, God will not 
keep away from those who are in such a state. 
It is not necessary for the Bible to tell us that he 
is a God of compassions ; he is, as our own nat- 
ural and necessary idea of him tells us. Since he 
is God, he must desire to interpose ; since he is 
God, the God who is love, he must desire to 
reveal himself to us and save us from our sins 
while salvation is possible. 

When a ship is lost at sea we send out other 
ships along her track in the hope that she may be 
found. Surely, then, God will do something to 
recover his lost children in this world. Years 
ago Sir John Franklin was lost in the Arctic 



GOB DESIRES TO BE VEAL HIMSELF. 21 

seas. You remember, or have read, how this 
country and England, moved by the appeals of 
his noble wife, sent men and ships to search for 
him. And shall we expect God to do nothing for 
his children who have strayed far from him, who 
are wretched and growing more wretched in their 
bondage to sin, and who will reach the land of 
hopelessness if permitted to go on? He will 
interpose; he will reveal himself; he will speak ; 
he will have the story of his coming so written 
down that all may read and believe it. Not only 
his own fatherly nature, but our wretched condi- 
tion will lead him to do it. He will do it unless 
there be some obstacle in the way which his own 
omnipotence cannot overcome. 
^ If there were a wrecked steamer on our coast, 
with a large number of our friends and relatives 
on board of it, think you we could stand on the 
rocks and look off indifferently upon it? How 
we should signal those friends to hold out ! how 
we should launch our life-boats, or shoot to them 
the lines and cables with which to help themselves 
ashore ! Nothing but utter powerlessness on our 
part would let us see one of them drown. And 
is God less desirous of saving the imperilled than 
we are? We act on the low plane of the tem- 
poral life, he on the high plane of the eternal. 
What is the death from which we would save 
those wrecked voyagers to that from which he 



22 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

would save all straying and sinning souls? He 
knows that he is our life and our home, but he 
sees us separated from him, and wandering in the 
midst of peril, far away. No matter that it is 
our own fault. We have forsaken God ; but God 
would cease to be God if he should forsake us. 
He will at least make a way for us to escape. 
We are not the less wretched, but the more, be- 
cause we are guilty and ill-deserving. 

All our sinning against him cannot make him 
cease to be the compassionate Father which he is. 
Look at our case any way you will, and it is clear 
that God must desire with a very great desire to 
reveal himself to us in his saving mercy. If there 
be any claims of justice in the way, any condem- 
nation, any honor of his own name and throne, he 
will provide for these. He will put all obstacles 
out of the way, so far as his infinite power and 
wisdom enable him to ; and he will come to us in 
the plenitude of his yearning love, and will gra- 
ciously do all that he wisely and consistently can, 
to restore the lost connection between us and him- 
self. As surely as God is God, and we his chil- 
dren have gone aAvay from him into woe and sin ; 
as surely as we need to be recovered into the 
ways of truth and blessedness, in which he our 
divine Father forever walks, so surely he must 
desire to interpose, — to speak to us the word of 
counsel and warning ; to do whatever the nature of 



GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 23 

things will permit him to do that we may be re- 
stored to his own holy and blessed paths. Does 
the earthly father's yearning bring him out to 
meet the prodigal son, and shall not God come 
out to us ? Does the woman sweep her house for 
the lost piece of silver, and shall he not search 
for us as with broom and candle ? Does the shep- 
herd go after the sheep on the mountain, and shall 
God willingly let any souv wander away and be 
lost? 

We expect God to reveal himself to men, not 
only because he as our Father desires to, and we 
need that he should, but because he hates sin and 
desires to increase the sum of holiness in his do- 
minions by all possible means. He is himself 
holy, and he would see all his children conformed 
to that law of holiness which guides him in his 
whole conduct. There are not two laws, — one 
for him and another for us. There is but one law. 
He lives and reigns that holiness may abound ; and 
all men were created for this one high end. So 
much the very idea of God which we all naturally 
have forces us to believe. And therefore we must 
believe that he does not wish to stay away from 
us, but desires to reveal himself to us ; for we 
know that we have all sadly swerved from the law 
of perfect holiness and truth, and need some divine 
power to bring us back to it. Whether we have 
any Bibles or not, we know as often as we reflect 



24 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

that there are wicked ways in us, and that God 
alone can lead us in the way everlasting. May I 
not therefore venture to repeat with some assurance 
my first proposition, " that nothing can be more sure 
than that God has spoken to men ? " Does not this 
seem very sure, though not positively proved, in 
view of God's strong desire to reveal himself to us? 
— a desire which he must feel, both in virtue of his 
fatherly nature and on account of our perishing 
need of succor, as also that he may turn us from 
sin to holiness, which is the highest and last end 
of all that he does? Certainly, I think we are 
ready to admit the revelation as a fact, though the 
nature of it may need yet to be considered. 

The assertion of this chapter is that " God must 
needs desire to reveal himself to men, and to pro- 
vide for an authentic record of that revelation." 
Let us look a little at the second part of the state- 
ment, — the authentic record. Of course, the 
record is nothing but for the facts recorded ; and 
the w T hole value of the record, that is of our Bible, 
lies in the assumption that it is an authentic ac- 
count of the special ways in which God has re- 
vealed himself to our sinful race. " But why these 
special revelations requiring him to provide some 
extraordinary record of them?" you may ask. 
Why is not nature a sufficient revelation of God 
to men? Nature can tell us something of God, 
but not that which we most need to know. She 



GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 25 

cannot reveal to us his moral attributes, though 
she may show us something of those which are 
natural. Nature tells us that God is powerful, 
since he makes and preserves the w r orld ; that he 
is wise, since he everywhere adapts means to ends. 
But she does not tell us that he is gracious, that 
he forgives sin, that he is compassionate and mer- 
ciful ; she does not clearly tell us that he is good 
or just. If we attempt to prove from nature that 
God is good, we find many facts which of them- 
selves go to show that he is not good. Why does 
he send pestilence and famine on the innocent? 
Why do so many persons die almost as soon as 
they begin to live ! So, too, we need something 
besides nature or history to prove the justice of 
God. We see the wicked prosper, and the right- 
eous under calamity. Nature seems to reward 
those who are evil, and to punish those who are 
good. She does not vindicate even the righteous- 
ness of God. And what can she tell us of his pity, 
of his fatherly tenderness, of his mercy and par- 
doning love? God himself must speak to men in 
order to assure them of these. He must speak to 
his children who are made in his own image, who 
are themselves capable of the moral emotions 
w^hich he feels. Only men created after his like- 
ness can know what he means when he speaks of 
his grace, of his forgiving and renewing mercy. 
It is far above nature ; only men to whom God 



26 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

himself comes can understand it, and such alone 
can give a true account of it to others. God must 
forever be the unknown God unless there are men 
to whom he directly speaks, and whom he enables 
to write down what he says for other men to read. 
And we cannot be wholly satisfied with what in- 
spired men have seen and heard, however accu- 
rately they have described it all. We demand 
a higher revelation than that which comes by any 
merely human agency. Only when the Word 
becomes flesh, when God enters into humanity and 
declares himself the Saviour of every man, do we 
see the Father as we have yearned that we might. 
If there have been no holy men speaking as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost, our case demands 
that there should be ; and God, who longs to save 
us, must desire such an order of men. And if 
God has spoken, we demand, and he must desire, 
that there should be accurate pens to record what 
he has said. And if God himself has not yet 
come and spoken in the flesh, we are all the time 
expecting that he will ; for our lost state is such 
as to require the most perfect possible revelation 
of his love ; and such a revelation he, as our in- 
finite Father, must above all things else desire to 
give to us. 

You know r Mrs. Hemans's familiar nursery hymn 
of the boy in the battle of the Nile, who was 
burned to death by standing at the post where 



GOB DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 27 

his father had put him. That child's faith in his 
father was unfaltering, — a beautiful and heroic 
trust. What a tribute to the father's goodness 
and fidelity it was ! The boy did not know that 
his father had been slain ; supposed him to be still 
alive 5 and therefore he felt perfectly safe in obey- 
ing orders and waiting for that father to bring him 
relief. But the God who is our Father is not dead. 
He is just what our own highest idea of him makes 
him to be, — the loving and ever-living Father of 
us all. He either has come or he will come ; for 
he knows our peril better than we do, and our 
most childlike faith that he will succor us is as 
nothing to his infinite desire to bring us help. It 
is related of a famous army officer of England, that 
while he was but a child his father one day left 
him on London Bridge, telling him to stay there 
till he should come back for him. The father went 
on his errands, became so absorbed as to wholly 
forget his promise ; returned home in the evening 
and was quietly reading when, missing the boy 
and asking after him, he was told that he had not 
been seen throughout the day. At once he be- 
thought him, and seizing his hat said, "I know 
where he is, and I will go for him." He went to 
the bridge, and there the boy was waiting for him 
to come. Dear friend, could that child so trust 
his forgetful father, and cannot we trust our God 
who never forgets ? Surely we will not withhold 



28 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

from him the tribute which the child gave to an 
earthly parent. He has not left men desolate 
through all these thousands of years. They have 
needed his succor, and he has had an infinite 
yearning to give it to them. How we misunder- 
stand him, and what a grievous wrong we do to 
his fatherly feelings if we say that he has shut us 
out from his presence, and has no desire that we 
should again look on his face. 

Those who have read Mr. Stanley's account of 
his journey through the " Dark Continent," re- 
member what a sad case he was in as he neared 
the western coast, and how implicitly he relied 
on the friendly aid of strangers living at Em- 
bomma to save him and his party from impending 
death. They had turned away from the terrible 
river, and had left the brave little boat, the " Lady 
Alice," brought all the way from England, " to 
bleach and rot to dust." At first they tried to 
march overland to the coast, but after a little gave 
up in utter despair. They had reached a small 
village of savages, and the account says : " March- 
ing through the one street of the village in 
melancholy and silent procession, voiceless as 
sphinxes, we felt our way down into a deep gully, 
and crawled up again to the level of the village 
site, and camped about two hundred yards away. 
They could go no further ; relief must come to 
them or they must die. The leader of the party 



GOD DESIRES TO REVEAL HIMSELF. 29 

now wrote a letter, addressed to any gentleman 
who speaks English at Embomma," in which he 
said : " I have arrived at this place from Zanzibar 
with one hundred and fifteen souls, — men, 
women, and children. We are now in a state of 
imminent starvation. We can buy nothing from 
the natives. ... I do not know you; but am 
told that there is an Englishman at Embomma, 
and, as you are a Christian, I beg you not to dis- 
regard my request." He then tells what his most 
urgent needs are, and adds, " The supplies must 
arrive within two days, or I may have a fearful 
time of it among the dying." His confidence 
proved not to be misplaced. Sooner than they 
had dared hope, and while they were struggling 
forward, " haggard, woebegone invalids, with 
bloated faces, but terribly angular bodies," the 
messengers reappeared, bringing more than had 
been sent for, and the cry arose, w It is true ! it is 
true ! food ! food, at last ! We are saved, thank 
God ! " Dear friends, what was the faith which 
Stanley had in English generosity to that which 
we should have in our gracious and loving God ! 
We need not apprise him that we are without 
hope in the world ; for he knows it much better 
than we. We need not try to awaken his sym- 
pathy : he yearns to help us more than we long for 
help. He has helped us. He has come unto us. 
His fatherly desire to rescue us would not let him 



30 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

do otherwise. As sure as he is God, and we are 
his famished children, there is somewhere bread 
which he has sent from heaven, — somewhere the 
word which he has spoken and which is the life 
and light of men. 



CHAPTER III. 

GOD CAN BEVEAL HIMSELF. 

According to the necessary idea which we have 
of God, he must desire to reveal himself to men : 
he is our Father, who would not be separated from 
his children, who especially yearns to come and 
save us out of the sins in which we are wandering. 

But in order that God may reveal himself to us 
he must work a miracle. The revelation is itself 
a miracle, — the one comprehensive miracle in 
which all others that we have to do with are 
included. Having seen that God desires to be 
revealed to men, our next question is, whether or 
not he can thus reveal himself, — can he do that 
which, by the very necessity of the case, is essen- 
tially miraculous? What is a miracle? It is 
something which men see, and which they cannot 
account for apart from the immediate agency of 
God. The creation of the world, if we had been 
there to see it, would have been to us a stupen- 
dous miracle. The upholding of nature in all her 
movements and processes, if we could see that she 
is upheld of God, would be to us a perpetual 
miracle. Anything is a miracle which God him- 
self manifestly does; and therefore the question 

31 



32 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

whether he can reveal himself, as he desires to, is 
the question whether he can do what is miracu- 
lous. The revelation of God to men, whatever 
shape it takes, must be a miracle so far as it is 
real. Where there is no miracle there is no rev- 
elation. 

You see, then, my dear friend, assuming that 
our Bible is a record of God's revelation of him- 
self to men, why w r e should not be at all surprised 
that it is a story of miracles from beginning to 
end. Indeed, miracles are the first things we 
look for in it ; and if we missed these we should 
throw it aside as not the revelation we are seek- 
ing. There have been persons, you know, who 
have tried to explain away miracles. They all 
admit that the Bible is in the main a true history ; 
but they try to account for the miracles in it on 
natural principles. They say that the walls of 
Jericho fell down owing to the vibratory motion 
which the marching of the host about the city, 
and the blowing of the horns, gave to them. 
They say that Christ did not walk on the sea, but 
along its edge, whence he reached down his hand 
and saved Peter. They say that Lazarus was not 
really raised, but that some of Christ's friends 
started a report to that effect after the crucifixion. 
Thus have these critics gone through the Bible. 
Anything which they cannot possibly account for 
on natural principles they throw out. What they 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 33 

cannot plausibly explain they often seek to ac- 
count for in the most absurd and puerile manner. 
They do not hesitate to say that the writers were 
mistaken ; that they admitted ill-founded rumors 
into their narrative ; that they exaggerated ; that 
in their enthusiasm they said things which our 
cooler judgment must reject. 

How strange that men should take so much 
pains to throw out of the Bible just that we should 
expect to find in it, — that which we first of all 
look for, which is involved in the very idea of a 
revelation from God, without which we can never 
have a revelation ! You might as well take all 
the light out of the sun and still call it the sun, as 
all the miracles out of a revelation and still call it 
a revelation. It is not the book which is full of 
miraculous accounts, but that w T hich is without 
them, which has no title to our belief or respect 
while it claims to be from God. If it is from 
God, it will speak of the works of God, which 
are miracles ; for in no other way can it reveal 
God to us. When God comes among men, it is 
that he may be made manifest to them, not that 
he may continue to be the unknown God. 

There are earthly princes who travel incognito 
among their subjects or in foreign lands. But do 
they do this from any desire to reveal themselves ? 
Certainly not. They act from just the opposite 
motive. They desire to conceal themselves. 



34 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

They do not wish it to be known who they are, 
lest they should be annoyed with attentions ; lest 
they should miss the leisure and enjoyment which 
they seek ; lest they should fail to see the people 
in their common, everyday condition. Of course 
they do not wish to be revealed ; to have those 
among whom they go know who they are. In 
the same way spies and detectives, policemen in 
citizen's clothes, go about. They do not wish to 
be revealed, but to be hidden, that they may fer- 
ret out some crime, or mature some mischief or 
conspiracy which they are planning. The work- 
ers of iniquity, and the officers of human law, 
hide themselves. But God is not a detective, nor 
a spy, nor an earthly prince. We know very 
well that we cannot hide our faults from him, 
And his object in coming is to deliver, to warn, 
to counsel, and to save. Shall we ever annoy him 
with our attentions? Most surely we shall not. 
He knows all about us before he comes. He 
comes to sympathize with us, to assure us that he 
is 'our loving Father, and the more we throng 
about him and besiege him for favors the better 
pleased with us he is. Occasionally a great king, 
or queen, or an ex-president travels openly so as 
to be seen and honored of all. Thus God does 
for our sake, and thus alone can he be revealed to 
us. He might as well not come at all if he comes 
only in disguise, so that we do not know who he 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 35 

is. You have read many descriptions of the 
"progress," so called, of an eastern king. He 
moves through his dominions at the head of a 
splendid retinue. When he comes to a new prov- 
ince the people swarm forth to meet him. They 
straighten the crooked roads, they level moun- 
tains, and fill up valleys, and everywhere the cry 
goes up, "Prepare you a way for the king, who 
is coming to show himself unto his humble peo- 
ple ! " Somewhat in this way Christ rode into 
Jerusalem, and that triumphal entry was not an 
act of vanity but of tender and lowly love. 

Thus it is that God must ever come, not dis- 
guised under natural law, but in his own proper 
person, or how can he be revealed? He does not 
wish to be disguised ; he wants us to know that 
it is he who speaks to us, that it is in truth his 
own almighty arm which is made bare. You see, 
therefore, that we speak only in a very limited 
and qualified sense when we say that God is re- 
vealed in nature. Nature suggests that there is a 
God ; still our hearts cry, w Show us the Father." 
Nature is that veil on the image of Isis which no 
man could lift. God cannot be wholly in nature, 
and when he comes and speaks to us, when he 
really and truly reveals himself, the transaction 
must be supernatural ; it must be miraculous just 
to the extent that God is revealed. 

When a fellow-man comes among us we expect 



36 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

him to act in accordance with his own character. 
If Mr. Tennyson should come among us, we 
should expect him to act like the shy and solitude- 
loving poet that he is. If an ambitious aspirant 
to fame and power should come, we should expect 
him to bluster about and make the most of his 
chances for showing himself off. We expect to 
see all persons acting in character, — the benevo- 
lent man benevolently, the selfish man selfishly, 
the proud man proudly, the vain man vainly, the 
modest man modestly, and so on. And now when 
God comes we do not expect him to act like some 
one else, but like himself, a wonder-working God. 
If he did only as others do, or only as we see 
nature doing, he would not be revealed. We 
should miss that which the very idea of such a 
revelation involves. If we take up a treatise on 
some subject in nature, the facts all carefully 
gathered, the reasonings logical, written with 
scientific accuracy, we should reject it at once if it 
claimed to come from God. There is nothing 
miraculous in it ; it only explains the doings of 
natural forces, and therefore it cannot be a revela- 
tion of God. God is not in it, but only nature 
and human skill. When God comes, when he 
makes a progress through his dominions, and 
shows himself to men, he must be properly at- 
tended, and his proper attendants are miracles. 
They are his own acts, which neither man nor 



GOD CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 37 

nature can do, but only he. As in the Apocalyp- 
tic scene the hosts of heaven rode on white horses 
after Him who had on his vesture the name " King 
of Kings and Lord of Lords," so when God comes 
to men we look to see miracles following in his 
train. We throw aside the books which have 
nothing miraculous in them, with the ready re- 
mark, "These can be no revelation of God." 

But when we take up a book whose first sen- 
tence is, "In the beginning God created the 
heavens and the earth," we are encouraged to read 
on. It is just what we expect when we find 
him speaking to his first-created child in the cool 
of the day. This book is not a mockery on the 
face of it, but reads like a true revelation of God ; 
for it speaks of God as coming to men in dreams, 
as talking with them, as calling out the good from 
among the evil to be especially his. We are glad 
to hear it tell of the plagues in Egypt, of the 
divided sea, of the manna and quails, and the 
pillar of cloud and fire, of the sun and moon that 
stood still, of the fire that came down on Carmel, 
of the great fish by which the Lord's servant was 
saved. We do not throw aside such a book as 
this, claiming to tell us what God has done among 
men, but are fascinated, and read on and on. 

It is above man ; it is above nature ; it is wholly 
divine and God-like, — just what we should expect 
in the revelation for which we long, when we read 



38 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he opened 
blind eyes and deaf ears and dumb mouths, that 
he made the palsied and crippled and leprous leap 
to their feet and walk, that he stood at the grave 
and said with a voice which the dead heard and 
obeyed, "Lazarus, come forth." If we believed 
in nothing but nature we might reject such a book, 
but we believe in God, and these are just such 
mighty deeds as we expect him to perform. We 
put ourselves beside St. Paul speaking to Agrippa. 
When St. Paul spoke of our Lord's resurrection, 
Agrippa, having only natural forces in mind, 
doubted. "Oh, yes," reasons Paul, "you may 
doubt if you know only nature, but I am speaking 
of God, and why should you think it a thing im- 
possible that God, with whom all things are 
possible, should raise the dead?" We are glad 
of all the history, the doctrine, the ethical instruc- 
tion which the book contains ; but we are especi- 
ally glad of the miracles in it, since these are what 
we first seek in any revelation of God. These, 
like the light of the sun, tell us that there is a sun ; ■ 
these, like the royal retinue, tell us that the per- 
sonage who is moving through is indeed a Prince. 
Take these away and our interest in the volume 
would be gone. It could not be the revelation 
which our God desires to make, and which we 
need to receive. We should turn away from it as 
from a firmament which had lost its stars. 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 39 

And God can surround himself with these 
mighty works w T hen he comes among men. Look 
at this statement a moment. We are God's chil- 
dren. And do you think he would make a world 
whose laws and natural forces should rise up as a 
separating wall between us and him ? Most surely 
he would not. Our idea of God obliges us to feel 
that he saw the end from the beginning. He knew 
whether or not the time would ever come when he 
could not control nature, when he could not over- 
rule or use her forces in the interest of his chil- 
dren, before he set up her framework. Certainly 
he would not have built that framework if it were 
ever to shut him away from those for whose sake 
he made it, if it were ever to keep him from 
coming to them and saving them out of any error 
or sin into which they might fall. It is written on 
the tablet of our hearts that man is God's crown- 
ing work, — that he stands at the head of creation. 
We see man having dominion over God's other 
works. We feel that all nature is a mistake if her 
forces cannot be wielded for the advantage of men. 
There would not be a material creation with its 
laws and forces if God cannot come through it, 
stop its movements, modify and control its action, 
as may be necessary for the good of his own im- 
mortal children. God not only desires to reveal 
himself to us, but he can do so, although a stu- 
pendous miracle is involved in the very idea of 



40 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

such a revelation. It is infinitely easy for him to 
do what so amazes us, as he must have seen when 
he made the world. 

And how glorious the character of God seems to 
us while he is thus caring for the least and most 
distant of the creatures made in his image ! I 
have heard men say that it does not comport with 
the dignity of the infinite God to be so concerned 
for the inhabitants of this little world. Ah, dear 
friend, they do not know what that word "in- 
finite" means, — what possibilities are in it, what 
responsibilities it involves ! Why do we say that 
a great man lowers himself by familiarity with the 
mean and vile ? Only because he is not infinitely 
great. He has his limitations. He cannot do all 
things. If he cares so much for what is beneath 
his station he may neglect more important things. 
He is capable of stain, and may not keep himself 
unspotted from the world if he mixes too freely 
with it. But let him be infinite, let him have all 
power, let him be incapable of wrong or stain, and 
we should reason just the other way. We say 
that he ought to stoop in love to every soul of 
man, since he can do it and still be true to him- 
self and every other interest. The sun floods with 
light every crevice of the world which is open to 
him ; yet he is not thereby impoverished. The 
tides of the ocean fill and overflow the smallest 
creeks and inlets all around its vast shores, unto 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 41 

the end of the world ; and this is just what the 
ocean should do, since its depths are in no danger 
of being drained. In like manner God does not 
need to husband his resources. They can never 
give out. 

If the universe should fall back into chaos, he 
could again call it forth ; could bring all its parts 
together, part to part, in beauteous and harmoni- 
ous array, and command them to resume their 
orderly march. A scholar once said, rather vainly 
perhaps, that when he wanted a new book he made 
it. But God can truly say that he makes a new 
world as often as he needs it for any purpose of 
his. And it becomes him not only to make worlds 
but destroy them, to rearrange them, to thrust his 
mighty arm through their intricate maze of natural 
law, for the sake of his children whom he crowned 
with glory and honor, and set over all the works 
of his hand. That he should neglect these would 
be the strange and amazing thing. But when we 
see him caring for them, rolling up the curtain of 
nature's laws, and stepping forth in love to lay 
hold of his least and lowest child, then we feel 
that he is true to our own idea of the infinite 
Father. In that revelation, that miracle, we see 
nature not degraded but ennobled; put to her 
highest and most sacred uses ; her ten thousand 
voices never praise God more than when she is 
wielded, or overruled, or set aside, that God may 



42 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

fulfil his desire of reaching and rescuing lost 
men. 

The form of the miracle in which God must ever 
be garmented when he comes to men may and 
should change at every stage of human develop- 
ment, but the miracle in its essence can never be 
absent. Some persons seem to think that all 
miracles are external, in the w T orld of matter, 
addressed to the bodily senses. And they ask, 
as though they had raised a formidable objection, 
w why have miracles ceased ? " In the broad sense 
of the word, my dear friends, miracles have not 
ceased. God is still revealing himself to men, 
and speaking to them as unmistakably as he ever 
spoke. Ah, if we would but listen, if we had ears 
to hear, there would be no doubt in our minds 
that God still walks in the midst of his churches. 
Dull as we are, he makes us pass through seasons 
of special awakening, of the turning of wicked 
men to him in such wondrous ways that we are 
forced to exclaim, " This is not man's doing ; lo ! 
God is here ! " When man fell from God he went 
as far down as it was possible for him to go. The 
descent was not gradual, but sudden and to the 
lowest extreme. Man fell as the Son of the 
Morning before him had fallen. The spirit in him 
came into subjection to the flesh, and in his fleshly 
nature man was but a savage even in the garden 
of Eden. He was an amiable savage at first, but 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 43 

became fierce and murderous as soon as the spirit 
in him fell. 

Now God, in revealing himself to his fallen 
child, must take into account this savage nature 
which controlled him. That nature could be pene- 
trated, and the enslaved spirit reached, only by 
revelations which should startle, which should 
terrify, which should compel attention, and over- 
awe and subdue. It was necessary that God 
should make much use of the element of fear in 
his first comings to men, in order that they might 
be induced to give him heed. But as man grew 
less barbarous, approached nearer to civilization, 
became developed in mind and heart, God showed 
himself less in outward and startling ways. Mount 
Sinai was changed to the Mount of Beatitudes as 
soon as the world was ready. When the blessed 
Son of God was needed rather than the terrible 
Elijah, that Son of God came, meek and lowly, 
born of a virgin. The miraculous element was still 
there in all its wonderfulness, — yet how changed 
in its form ! In like manner while God was pro- 
viding for a record of so many of his revelations 
as the world might afterwards need, it was neces- 
sary that wonders in the world of matter, signs of 
his presence and approval, should attend his ser- 
vants. But now, those appointed servants having 
written out that record, the world having at length 
received a volume giving it such guidance as it 



44 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

needs in spiritual things, the occasion for the 
outward manifestations is gone, and they are with- 
drawn. God still reveals himself, he speaks to 
men ; the essential element in the first miracles is 
yet with us. But men are not what they once 
were. Probably the worst savage of to-day is less 
wild than the primitive man. Though the spirits 
of men are still in bondage to the flesh, their 
hearts and minds have been growing toward re- 
finement, in some races less and in others more, 
through thousands of years. Those which are 
now lowest down have for the most part each had 
their turn of standing highest. They have fallen 
a second time by despising the divine mercy which 
came to them to save. If God has ceased to speak 
to any, it is because it is impossible to renew 
them again unto repentance. Still, so far as we 
are concerned, it is true that the revelation which 
we need is not outward so much as inward, — not 
that which startles and terrifies, but that which 
convinces and persuades. 

God desires to speak to us ; he can speak to us, 
however miraculous the act may be ; he does speak 
to us. Not only is he revealed in great revivals 
of religion, in the conversion of relations to the 
gospel of his Son, in the bowing of the hardened 
and reckless worldling in penitence and faith ; but 
to you and to me, in our conscience, in the silence 
and secrecy of our own thought, he is daily re- 



GOB CAN REVEAL HIMSELF. 45 

vealed, speaking courage to us if we faint in his 
service, saying unto us, if we yet stray in the 
paths of sin, " Oh, my child, why not turn unto me ? 
Will you not from this time say unto me, My 
Father, thou art the guide of my youth ? " 

" The Lord, how fearful is his name! 
How wide is his command ! 
Nature, with all her moving frame, 
Rests on his mighty hand. 

" Immortal glory forms his throne, 
And light his awful robe ; 
While with a smile, or with a frown, 
He manages the globe. 

" A word of his almighty breath 
Can swell or sink the seas ; 
Build the vast empires of the earth, 
Or break them as he please. 

" On angels, with unveiled face, 
His glory beams above ; 
On men he looks with softest grace, 
And takes his title, Love." 



CHAPTER IV. 

INSPIKATION. 

If our Bible is a trustworthy record of words 
and deeds in which God has revealed himself to 
men, then must it needs be specially inspired. It 
must be God's book, not man's. God must be 
the author of it, however he made use of men in 
writing it. Under his immediate superintendence 
and guidance it must have been written, or we 
cannot accept it as an adequate account of what 
he has done and said. 

We saw in the chapter before this that God's 
revelation of himself must, from the nature of the 
case, be wholly miraculous. He is outside of 
nature, and comes down into her realm by a sov- 
ereign act in dealing with us. We cannot rise 
into sympathy with him, so as accurately to de- 
scribe what he does for us, unless he lifts us up 
into such sympathy. The revelation which is 
miraculously made must be miraculously written 
down. This is our very short and all-sufficient 
reply to those who ask us why we believe in the 
inspiration of the Bible. It must be inspired or 
it cannot be what we are seeking. It is no rev- 
elation of God if it is not God's book. To say 

46 



INSPIRATION. 47 

that it is such a revelation, and that it is a merely 
human book, is a contradiction in terms. 

God desired to reveal himself to us because we 
had left him, and were unable of ourselves to find 
the way of truth and life. This I have already 
shown in the last chapter but one. If, now, we 
say that we can find our way back to God ; that 
we need not to be guided and led ; that, uninspired 
and unhelped, we can write down God's thoughts 
concerning us, then all occasion for the revelation 
is taken away. This makes our Bible a merely 
human book, not a divine revelation ; a collection 
of writings which has no special authority, which 
we may criticise just as we do other books, reject- 
ing what is above our reason, throwing out of it 
all that is marvellous or strange. To be worth 
anything to us it must not only be above nature 
and reason, but it must bring with it the evidence 
that it is the word of God. We often say of the 
Bible that it is God's word ; and we must feel that 
we are right in saying this, or the Bible is of 
small account to us. 

Christ is in the highest sense the word of God, — 
the word made flesh, as he is the highest divine 
revelation to men. But it is the office of all 
words to reveal thoughts, and therefore any book 
which reveals God's thoughts to us may be called 
the word of God. He may have employed human 
agents to write it ; but he so lifted them into sym« 



48 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

pathy with him, so made them see all things from 
his point of view, so guided and controlled them 
that the words which they wrote down were not 
their own, but truly and properly his. 

Such is my meaning when I say that the record 
of God's revelation to us must needs be specially 
inspired, and is nothing to us so far as it is not. 
I do not use the word "inspired" as it is often 
used. There is an inspiration w T hich consists 
wholly in natural excitement ; it is not at all su- 
pernatural, miraculous, divine. It is perfectly 
proper for us to say, using the word in this sense, 
that any man is inspired who is so aroused and 
raised up in mind as to give him a magnetic 
power over us. We perform acts of inspiration, 
or speak words which charm and subdue men, 
when thus lifted up in soul. But this is only the 
inspiration of genius ; it is wholly natural ; it 
does not bring with it that divine stamp which 
any revelation of God must needs have. It was 
in this merely human, unauthoritative way that 
Wordsworth was inspired when he wrote his ode 
on immortality ; that Shakespeare was inspired 
when he wrote Hamlet and Othello and Lear. 
Some of the greatest poets have represented 
themselves as under the guidance of a superhuman 
power in what they wrote. They took up their 
pen, and then invoked their muse to tell them 
what they should write. Thus Homer says, at the 



INSPIRATION. 49 

beginning of the Iliad, "Sing, oh muse, the wrath 
of Achilles, which brought woe to the Greeks 
and sent unnumbered souls to Hades." And 
at the beginning of the Odyssey he says, "Tell 
me, oh muse, of the crafty man who sailed over 
the sea and saw many cities and lands." Virgil, 
at the beginning of the iEneid, says, "Tell me, 
oh muse, of the man whom angry Juno drove 
from Troy to the Lavinian shores." Even Milton, 
imitating this classic usage, says, at the beginning 
of his "Paradise Lost," — 

"Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
Sing, heavenly muse." 

Such was the ancient custom. Possibly it came 
down into history from the times when God did 
indeed speak to his prophets, and tell them what 
to say from him to men. But the device was 
dropped after a time, and is now almost never 
seriously used. The muse was a creation of the 
poet's fancy ; he did not claim to be supernaturally 
inspired. If asked if he had come to men with a 
special message from God, he no doubt would 
have said no. 

Men of this class, however much genius they 
may have, and though they say and do wonderful 



50 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

things, are not on that account God's messengers, 
of whom he has taken hold and sent them to 
speak and to write his words. Much humbler 
men than they, the poor and unlettered, may be 
God's inspired agents ; for he loves to hide from 
the wise and prudent what he reveals to babes. 
He told the child Samuel what he did not tell to 
Eli. He showed to the shepherds of Bethlehem 
what he did not show to Herod's wise men. He 
chooses the weak things rather than the mighty, 
the things which are not rather than the things 
which are, that no flesh may glory in his pres- 
ence. There have been better men than Balaam, 
yet God laid hold of him and made him speak 
God's thoughts concerning Israel. The more you 
parade the faults of those who speak and write 
God's words for him the more do you exalt his 
sovereigntjr, the more manifestly do you make 
their words his words, what they say and do a 
revelation of his will, who sends by whom he will 
send. When a book claims to be from God, and 
bears his marks upon it, its claim is not weakened 
but strengthened if it has been written by imper- 
fect men. For the best men cannot rise to that 
revelation ; and God, by using the lowest, proves 
that he can save us all. He by inspiring them 
shows himself to be the very God whom we need. 
What he does in them proves that he can save to 
the uttermost. Thus St. Paul felt while he re- 



INSPIBATION. 51 

called the wickedness of his early life, saying : 
" I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ 
might shew forth all long-suffering, for a pattern 
to them which should hereafter believe on him." 
If God could save such as Saul of Tarsus, and 
inspire him to be a revealer of God to others, 
then is there hope for us all. And our idea of 
God as the infinite Father is such that this large 
hope is what we expect a revelation from him 
especially to bring. The lowly and mean lot on 
earth of the messengers, and their sins out of 
which God saves them, are therefore a strong wit- 
ness that any book which they claim to bring from 
God is indeed God's message to us. Any man 
who speaks to us of God must be guided of God ; 
and the poorer the messenger the richer the hope 
for us. 

It does not become us to say that all the revela- 
tions of himself which God has made to any men 
are recorded in the book which we fondly call our 
Bible. It does not hinder this Bible from being an 
adequate ^revelation for all men to admit that other 
revelations have been made. I do not say that 
there are others, but would give any other books 
claiming to be revelations a chance to prove their 
claim. I think one thing must always be true of 
any revelation ; it must not be behind the best 
spirit of the times in which it is made, and it must 
point the men of those times forward to something 



52 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

better, not backward to something worse. This 
criterion is enough to throw out any pretended 
book of Mormon, the Koran, the sayings and 
prophesyings of a large class who are always 
bringing in some new system of religious faith. 
The Bible which we have can meet this test. No 
part of it was, so far as it claimed to be from God, 
behind the best spirit of the age in which it came, 
while it pointed forward to something better. 
And to-day the Bible, taken as a whole, is so far 
ahead of the best human thought, in what it says 
on religious and spiritual themes, that we some- 
times wonder whether the world can ever come 
up to its standards and ideals. 

I think we all must say, from this point of view, 
that the Bible contains revelation enough for the 
whole world, even if it does not contain all that 
God has made. It does not, according to what 
we read in its own pages. The words and deeds 
of our blessed Lord were not all recorded. St. 
John supposes that if they had been the world 
could not have contained the books. Very many 
of his precious sayings have not been reported to 
us. One or two, omitted by the evangelists, we 
have in the letters of St. Paul. St. Paul himself 
speaks of a letter of his which we do not find in 
our Bible. God may have said and done a great 
many things which were true revelations of him, 
yet of which we have no account. But we have 



INSPIRATION. 53 

enough. Any man who knows the Bible knows 
that he can find all the instruction, comfort, and 
guidance that he needs in the Bible, — just such 
help as he expects from God, and such as he could 
not trust any one else to bring. I do not under- 
take to say that God never spoke to any men but 
those whose names are recorded in our Bible. It 
relieves my mind to feel that he spoke to the most 
ancient of the Egyptians, to the Persians, the 
Chaldeans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Latins, 
and not exclusively to the Hebrews. But it is a 
remarkable fact, granting that we do see the true 
God in those old religions, that none of them has 
ever displaced the religion of Christ ; that they 
each and all, when brought face to face with him, 
confess that he is the express image of the God 
whom they faintly reflect ; that they are not so 
much destroyed as fulfilled by losing their separate 
forms and blending together in one blessed wor- 
ship and fellowship in him. Some of the sacred 
books of those religions claim to be from God, 
and that claim entitles them to our respect ; that 
claim leads us to examine them. And if we decline 
to receive them as true revelations of God it is 
because we miss in them certain essential things 
which such a revelation, intended for the salvation 
of men, must contain. 

But if any book not claiming to be inspired, not 
claiming to be written under the special guidance 



54 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

and control of God, comes to us and says that it 
is a revelation of God's mind and will towards 
us, we ought to cast it aside at once. From the 
nature of the case it cannot be what it pretends 
to be ; for only that which comes from God can 
reveal God. Nature came from God, and she 
reveals the wisdom and power of God ; the hu- 
man spirit comes from God, and that reveals his 
justice and truth. And so any book must come 
from him, must be written by men whom he has in- 
spired to write it, which reveals to us his pity, his 
mercy, his redeeming love. The world is full of 
books claiming to be only human, yet affirming 
that they tell us all of God which can ever be 
known. But all of these books together can never 
make a Bible for us ; they are not a revelation, 
for they are not supernatural, not divine. The 
"free religionist" comes and tells us his dream, 
the materialist comes and tells us his, the idealist 
and pantheist come and tell us theirs. And they 
say to us, "Here is the explanation of the riddle of 
life and the world." We look at their portly 
volumes, and we ask them, "Did God give you 
these words to speak?" "Oh, no!" say they, 
"we thought them out ourselves." "Alas, then," 
is our answer, "they cannot be to us the light 
which we are seeking. They are simply human ; 
they do not reveal God. You who write them 
are just as much in the dark about God as we. 



INSPIRATION. 55 

We have all lost our way together ; we alike need 
that God himself should speak to us and tell us 
what is truth. 

We resemble travellers on some vast plateau 
who have all lost their way, who cannot tell which 
way is east, and who are as likely to go straight 
away from as toward the point they wish to reach 
every step they take. We are not only all thus 
lost, but a mist has settled down upon us which 
hides the sky. You wise theorists, looking on us, 
say, "Those people yonder are sadly befogged;" 
but you are just as much in the fog as we. None 
of us can guide the others. What we need is one 
whom God has guided into the truth. Only some 
book which he has caused to be written can be our 
compass. Nothing less than this can be to us the 
needle ever pointing to the north, wiiich we alike 
need. Nothing less than a book for whose accu- 
racy God vouches can tell us which way is toward 
the sunrising, where are the fixed stars by which 
the lost soul may find its way, in what paths we 
may return to our homes rather than get farther 
from them. 

No matter, my dear friend, how brilliantly men 
may talk to us, or how wisely, learnedly, and pro- 
foundly. If they do not pretend to give us any- 
thing supernatural, anything divine ; if they only 
speak in their own name, declaring that they are 
not inspired any differently from all men, except 



56 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

perhaps a little more, then we cut them short in 
the midst of their vain boasting. They cannot 
reveal God to us, for he has not sent them. They 
still leave us in the dark. Their knowledge is all 
human and natural. They have not seen and 
known God any more than we. 

But now, in the midst of these confused voices 
of men, — of men who are in their own wisdom 
trying to make us understand God, — there comes 
to us a book whose writers take no credit to them- 
selves. They declare that the words which they 
speak are not their own, but have been given to 
them from God. We open this volume, so differ- 
ent from all the others in what it claims to be, and 
begin to read. The writers are many of them 
humble men, all of them imperfect. They insist 
that they simply record, under a divine impulse 
and guidance, what they have witnessed God say- 
ing, or doing, or bringing to their knowledge. 
"The Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto 
him, Where art thou? " we read almost in the be- 
ginning; and then God declares to Adam what 
are to be the consequences of sin. We turn over 
a leaf, and again we read, " The Lord said unto 
Noah, come thou and all thy house into the ark ; 
for thee have I seen righteous before me in all this 
generation." Looking a little farther on, we find 
these words : " Now the Lord had said unto 
Abram, get thee out of thy country, and from thy 



INSPIRATION. 57 

kindred, and from thy father's house, into a land 
that I will show thee." Many passages like these, 
showing us that God himself is claimed as speak- 
ing to men in this unique book, we pass over as 
we glance hastily along. When the Lord was 
about to destroy the cities of the plain, he said, 
" Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I 
do? " and he came to his chosen servant, and told 
him all. " God said unto Isaac," " God said unto 
Jacob," we read again and again. The Lord 
appeared unto Moses in the burning bush, and 
said, " I am come down to deliver my people out 
of the hand of the Egyptians. . . . Come now, 
therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that 
thou may est bring forth my people. . . . And 
thou shalt say unto the children of Israel I AM 
hath sent me unto you." 

All along, dear friend, we find the signs 
that God is revealing himself in this book, for 
everything takes place under his guidance and by 
his command. Passing on a little we come to 
this : " And God spake all these words saying " 
— -saying what, dear friend? Saying the Ten Com- 
mandments, which are at the bottom of all true 
religion, — a perfec| standard of life and worship, 
which Israel failed to come up to, and which even 
the Christian church has not yet reached. The 
Tabernacle was lifted up, and all its rites ordered, 
as the temple was afterwards built, under the 



58 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

direction of God. God, in the pillar of cloud and 
tire, showed the people where to pitch their camp 
and how to continue their march. After the death 
of Moses the Lord spake unto Joshua saying, 
ff Arise, go over this Jordan, thou and all this 
people." The miraculous, God-revealing element 
was conspicuous throughout his career. So, too, 
the Judges do not act in their own name, but 
claim to be God's instruments. To Eli, and to 
all Israel, this book says it was not Samuel who 
spoke, but God spoke through him. Thus was it 
with all the prophets, — Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, 
Isaiah, Jeremiah, to the time of the carrying away. 
"Thus saith the Lord," is the announcement with 
which they begin their messages. They declare 
that God is moving before us in their words, that 
they are nothing in themselves, but are inspired 
and controlled by him. This truth is especially 
taught to Ezekiel, who spoke during the captivity, 
God reveals himself gloriously to the prophet, 
who is afraid to go to his fellow-captives, and then 
says, " I send thee to the children of Israel. . , . 
And thou shalt speak my words unto them. . . . 
Open thy mouth and eat that I give thee. And 
when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me, 
and, lo ! a roll of a book was therein." 

We read on and on, fascinated by this wondrous 
book, which, unlike any other, declares itself to be 
the words of God ; and at length we come to one 



INSPIRATION. 59 

fairer than the children of men, through whom 
God, who spake to the fathers by the prophets, 
now speaks, and whom he calls his Son. His 
person, his whole history, and his teachings reveal 
God to men. His birth was miraculous, his daily 
path in life blossomed with miracles of love and 
pity, he rose from the dead and went into heaven 
in a wholly miraculous manner. This wondrous 
person declares that he came from God, that he is 
God's Son, and speaks the words of God. He 
says that he is wholly under a divine control ; that 
he is inspired and led by the eternal Sprit ; that he 
speaks the things which he has seen the Father do ; 
that he comes to do the will of him that sent him. 
He goes even farther than this, — insisting that he 
is very God of very God, God manifested in the 
flesh, — saying that whoso hath seen him hath seen 
the Father. 

Now, if God is ever to be revealed to us, saving 
us from sin and leading us into the truth, here 
certainly is the brightest promise we have yet 
found of his coming. This Jesus calls himself the 
Christ, the Saviour of the world ; he declares that 
his words are spirit and life. He is more than in- 
spired of God ; he is God, and speaks in his own 
name as well as the Father's. And he did not 
commit his life and teachings to the idle winds. 
He called about him twelve men, instructed them, 
guided their wavering steps, told them the Spirit 



60 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

of God would bring to their remembrance every- 
thing he had said unto them, sent them forth in 
his name, saying, ?? Go teach all nations, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, 
and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe 
all things whatsoever I have commanded you." 
Thus are all the apostles, who speak to us in the 
Acts and Epistles, placed under the divine leader- 
ship and control, so that they too reveal God unto 
us in what they say and do. 

And the last writing in the wondrous book has 
the name Revelation given to it, thus impressing 
our minds, just as we are about to lay down the 
volume, with the thought that it all comes from 
God. "Kevelation, Kevelation!" we exclaim; 
"this is what not only the last writing but all the 
writings in the collection claim to be." The whole 
is from God just as truly as any of it is from him ; 
and the woes threatened against him who shall 
take anything from that last writing or add any- 
thing to it may, with equal justice, be threatened 
for the alteration of any other part of the book. 

Such is the Bible in its claims and professions, 
as we see upon glancing through it. And what 
an interest the fact that it claims to be above 
everything else a revelation of God gives to it? 
See the ancient volume tying quietly by itself, 
waiting for you in your pews, in your counting- 
rooms and homes ; translated into more than two- 



INSPIRATION. 61 

hundred languages and dialects, sailing over all 
seas, crossing deserts and mountains, penetrating 
the wild forest and jungle, clutched by the soldier 
dying on the field of battle and by the wrecked 
sailor going down into his watery grave. What if 
it should not be true ? It must be true ! As surely 
as there is a God of love in the heavens it cannot 
be false. He has spoken to men somewhere, 
and here if anywhere. Tell us, O Book ! tell us, 
O world ! tell us, O history ! tell us,0 sinning and 
sorrowing heart ! is not this indeed and in truth 
a record of God's words to men? 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 

We have seen that such a revelation as we need, 
and as God desires to make to us, must, from the 
nature of the case, be miraculous. Any trust- 
worthy account or record of it by men must, there- 
fore, be necessarily made under the immediate and 
controlling guidance of God, — that is to say, the 
writers of such a Bible as we expect from God 
must be inspired. 

Now here comes a succession of writers, reach- 
ing along in history from the Exodus to the death 
of the apostles, who hand us a book which we 
open and find to be full of the records of miracles, 
which they say is a revelation of God, which they 
declare that they have written under a divine im- 
pulse and direction. Are these writers to be 
believed ? In order to subject them to the severest 
tests we will not just yet let them speak for them- 
selves, and we will try to forget that the book 
which they bring us is wondrously like what any 
revelation of God to us must needs be. Do they 
bring other men, and other records and facts along 
with them as witnesses to their veracity? This 
is now our question. Dear friend, they bring so 

62 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 63 

much of this external evidence with them that I 
am embarrassed by the amount of it. It is largely 
of such a nature as to be unsuited to our present 
purpose. You must seek it in the learned volume. 
Some of it, however, I will try to give ; not as an 
adequate presentation, but as a specimen or hint 
of what might be said. 

Josephus first takes the stand. He was a 
scholar and a warrior, whom his countrymen, the 
Jews, disowned as a traitor at the time of the de- 
struction of Jerusalem. After the downfall of the 
sacred city he went with the conquerors to Rome, 
where he was a favorite of the emperors, and 
where he wrote his histories. Of such an one we 
must at least say that he is not a too favorable wit- 
ness. Yet he, speaking for himself and all Jews, 
says : " We have not innumerable books which 
contradict each other, but only twenty-two, which 
contain the history of all past times, and are justly 
believed to be divine. Five of these belong to 
Moses, and contain his laws, and the history of the 
origin of mankind, and reach to his death. This 
is a period of nearly three thousand years. From 
the death of Moses to Artaxerxes, who, after 
Xerxes, reigned over the Persians, the prophets 
who lived after Moses wrote down the events of 
their times in thirteen books. The other four 
books contain hymns to God and precepts for 
men." In this enumeration the twelve minor 



64 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

prophets count as one book. Josephus goes on to 
say : " What trust we put in these our writings is 
manifest by our deeds. Though so long a time 
has elapsed, no one has dared to add to or take 
from them, or make any change in them whatever. 
It is, as it were, inborn with every Jew, from the 
first origin of the nation, to consider these books 
as the doctrines of God, to stand by them con- 
stantly, and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them. 
It is no new thing to see the captives of our nation, 
many of them in number and at many different 
times, endure tortures and deaths of all kinds in 
the public theatres, rather than utter a word 
against our laws or the records which contain 
them." Such is one testimony that the writers of 
the Old Testament are to be believed. But what 
Josephus and his whole nation said and were ready 
to die for does not stand alone. Men of other 
nations confirm the trustworthiness of the Old 
Testament writers more than I can here tell. 

Go into the hall of Syrian antiquities in the 
Louvre, when you may happen to be at Paris, and 
look at what is called the Moabite stone. Examine 
it carefully, for it has an interesting history, and 
there is carved on it a most valuable record. It is 
rock of the hardest species, broken into several 
pieces, which have been carefully fitted together 
and embedded in cement, so that the original in- 
scription on it may be read. The existence of this 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 65 

rock was made known to the French consul at 
Jerusalem, as you may perhaps remember. It 
had been found in the land of Moab, east of the 
Dead Sea. Hearing that it was a very ancient 
relic of some sort, the consul resolved to secure it. 
Men were sent to buy it if necessary, and to bring 
it away. It could not be bought of those who 
claimed to be its owners ; and those sent for it 
w r ere set upon by armed men, while they were 
taking an impression of characters on it, and 
barely escaped, one of them being severely 
w r ounded. The stone was now broken into several 
pieces by those who said they owned it, and they 
offered to sell the pieces to any person or persons 
who could pay the very large price which they 
asked for them. The French consul, to save the 
fragments from being scattered, to the utter loss 
of the inscription, at once sent to negotiate w r ith 
the wild men. At length the terms were agreed 
upon, and the pieces secured. They were put to- 
gether, and the lettering w T as deciphered. It was 
found to be nearly three thousand years old. It 
was a record of the wars and mighty deeds of 
Mesha, one of the kings of Moab. Most of these 
wars were with the kings of Israel, one of whom, 
Omri, is named. 

Turning now to our Bibles, we find that Moab 
paid tribute to Israel from the time of David to 
the death of Ahab. Ahab was of the house of 



6Q NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Omri ; and we read that Mesha, king of Moab, 
rebelled after Ahab died, and was successful in 
some of his wars against Israel. The two records 
run along side by side, and that of the Moabite 
king, carved on the rock, confirms that which we 
find in the Old Testament. The stone, so far as 
it says anything to the point, says that the writers 
of the books of Kings and Chronicles told the 
truth. They give us a record of events which 
actually occurred. They are trustworthy. They 
are to be believed. 

This Moabite stone is only a hint, dear friends, 
of the vast progress which has, of late years, been 
made in confirming the records of the Bible. 
Something new is found almost every year in 
Egypt, in Assyria, or in the Holy Land. We 
have no other historical writings which go back so 
far as those of the Bible. Hence, we formerly 
read much in our Bibles which secular history did 
not confirm ; and we believed it more because it 
met our deep want of a revelation, than because 
there were external evidences to its truth. But 
now the study of antiquitj^, the discovery of old 
monuments, enthusiastic researches in cities buried 
thousand of years ago, are coming to our help. 
It used to be said that the testimonies for the Bible 
were all in, and that the objections to it were con- 
tinually on the increase. But the state of the case 
is getting to be just reversed. The objections are 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 67 

all in, and they are steadily fading away before 
this new light which has begun to burst upon us 
out of the sepulchre of the ancient world. There 
is, we are beginning to find, a secular history con- 
firmatory of the Bible records, written in stone or 
laid away in tombs, and going back to the dawn of 
time. Dr. Schliemann is not so surely confirming 
the words of the classic poets, by what he has 
found at Troy and MycensG, as others are confirm- 
ing Moses and the prophets by what they are find- 
ing along the Nile, on either slope of the Jordan, 
and at Nineveh and Babylon. 

A traveller once asked a friend, who was familiar 
with Egypt and its antiquities, where he could 
find a guide-book to that country. w Your Bible," 
said he. "Take that. The Bible is the best." 
This man had gone over the land. He had stud- 
ied- the picture-writing and the emblems on its 
obelisks and the walls of its half-buried temples. 
He had groped his way into pyramid, into cata- 
comb ; had seen the papyrus with its long-buried 
testimony ^coming forth. The nature of the idol- 
atry, the forms of worship, the habits of priests, 
the learning and the civil and military customs of 
the early times had long been his study. And he 
knew that so much of the Bible as pertained to 
Egypt could be no myth, no legend, but must 
have been written by one who had lived in Egypt, 
and who described events which he had seen. 



68 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

So if we go to Assyria, and there read those 
libraries of brick and stone which Rawlinson and 
others have opened to us, we find that so much of 
the Old Testament as has to do with Assyria is 
wonderfully confirmed. We find there, in cunei- 
form letters, either cut in the stones or stamped 
on the bricks, clear traditions of the flood, and of 
the building of Babel and its tower. Passing on 
to the times when the kings of Israel began to be 
at war with the kings of Assyria, or in alliance 
with them, we find the witness to the accuracy of 
the Bible records all that we could expect. The 
Bible says that Tiglath-Pileser "took Damascus 
and slew Rezin," at the request of Ahaz, king of 
Judah; and an Assyrian fragment says that he 
defeated Rezin, captured Damascus, and took 
tribute of the king of Samaria. The Bible says 
that the father of Sennacherib fought against 
Ashdod and took it, and in the annals of Assyria 
it is said that he made war in Southern Syria, and 
took Ashdod. The Bible says that Sennacherib 
came up against Judah, and took its fenced cities, 
and made Hezekiah pay tribute ; the Assyrian 
annals say the same thing, and that too at much 
greater length. Of Sennacherib's second invasion, 
which was so fatal to him, and which the Bible so 
minutely describes, the Assyrian inscriptions very 
naturally say nothing ; but there is an Egyptian 
version of the event, in which the destruction of 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 69 

Sennacherib's host is ascribed to divine power. 
The Bible says that Esarhaddon "took Manasseh 
among the thorns, and bound him with fetters, 
and carried him away to Babylon"; Esarhaddon's 
own annals say that among his tributaries was 
"Manasseh, king of Judah." 

To these notices of contemporary history, con- 
firming Bible history just before the captivity, I 
might add others which bear witness that the 
Bible account of the captivity itself is correct. 
There are, among the excavated trophies at Baby- 
lon, bas-reliefs and other sculptures of figures and 
utensils belonging to the temple at Jerusalem, 
which witness to the truth of what our Bibles tell 
us. Even after the captivity, what Ezra and 
Nehemiah say of the return, and the rebuilding of 
the temple, is vouched for by the monuments of 
the conquerors. For instance, we are surprised 
to see how like worshippers of the true God Cyrus, 
Darius, and Artaxerxes speak in their proclama- 
tions. But the cuneiform inscriptions have abun- 
dantly shown that those kings believed in one 
supreme God, and would naturally use such words 
as the Bible puts in their mouth. The Bible says 
that a decree was issued stopping the work on the 
temple, but that it was removed in the time of 
Darius the Persian ; and on the monuments re- 
cently found Darius says, " I restored to the people 
the religious worship of which the Magian had 



70 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

deprived them. As it was before so I arranged 
it." 

I do not claim that I have wholly mastered this 
subject of external evidences. Or if I had, it is 
too great a subject, requiring too much careful 
study and collation of parallel passages in the 
Bible and on ancient monuments to be adequately 
or properly treated in this volume. Please con- 
sider what I have given as only hinting at the vast 
mass which might be adduced. And the most 
encouraging fact about this evidence is that it is 
all the time accumulating. Probably never was 
there more of it brought to light in the same 
length of time than has been unearthed and 
deciphered during the last fifty years. And from 
all that scholars engaged in that kind of researches 
say, we may infer that their discoveries have but 
just begun. Out of the magnificent tombs of 
ancient warriors and kings in the East, new wit- 
nesses are all the time leaping forth, who tell us 
that the writers of the Bible have given us a true 
record of what they themselves heard and saw. 

That the Old Testament is at least as trustworthy 
as the New is clear from the way in which the 
New Testament writers speak of it. In the whole 
New Testament we find no intimation that any- 
thing in the Old Testament is untrue. Some of 
the ancient books are quoted much oftener than the 
others, — a few of them perhaps not even once; 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 71 

but they are all classed together, and held to be 
the truth, which holy men wrote as they were 
moved by the Holy Ghost. In the Gospel of 
Matthew the Old Testament is either quoted or 
alluded to more than ninety times ; in Luke, fifty- 
eight times, and in John, forty. There are nearly 
eighty references to it in Eomans, and more than 
eighty in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The Reve- 
lation of St. John is so like some of the Old Testa- 
ment prophecies, especially those of Daniel, as 
hardly to read like a New Testament book. Some 
critics have thought that there are in it as many as 
two hundred references to the ancient canon. If, 
therefore, the New Testament writers are to be 
believed, those of the Old are to be, and were 
inspired. 

But the external testimonies to the New Testa- 
ment are very abundant. We do not have to dig 
among the ruins of buried cities for them ; the 
secular history of Palestine, and of the Roman 
Empire, are before us in clear records, and these 
agree with the New Testament accounts. What 
the four gospels say of the political status of the 
Jews, and of the Roman governors placed over 
them, the history of Rome fully confirms. And 
if the Gospels and Epistles, the Acts and the 
Revelation, are witnessed to as accurate by con- 
temporary history, in what they have to say of 
the persons and common events of their times, 



72 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

then it would be contrary to all reason for us to 
doubt them when they say that they speak unto 
us the words of God. It is not possible to believe 
that they, who are so conscientiously accurate on 
the lower plane of temporal things, should be 
regardless of truth on the higher plane of spiritual 
things. Since they say that they bring us a 
revelation from God to men, we must believe that 
they do, and we must concede to them the inspira- 
tion which the case demands, and which they claim. 
We must do this unless we go as far as those who, 
in the wildness of their unbelief, deny that there 
ever were any such persons as Christ and his 
apostles ; who affirm that the New Testament 
books were simply made up and invented. But 
Christ and his apostles did live, or nothing is 
certain which took place a few hundred years ago. 
Christ did live, and teach, and heal, and love, and 
die, as the four gospels say he did ; and the 
apostles and others did write as our Bibles say 
they did. Nearly all these writings, certainly the 
most important of them, were well known within 
a hundred years after the crucifixion. 

The martyr Ignatius, who lived in the time of 
some of the apostles, was familiar with those 
writings. He speaks as though they were all 
well- known and undoubted truths, " of the descent 
of Christ from David — his conception by the 
Holy Ghost — his birth of a virgin — her name, 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 73 

Mary — his manifestation by a star — his baptism 
by John — his appeals to the prophets — the 
anointing of his head with ointment — his suffer- 
ings and crucifixion under Pilate and Herod the 
tetrarch — his resurrection, not on the Sabbath, 
but on the Lord's Day — his eating and drinking 
with his disciples after he had risen — the mission 
of the apostles — their obedience to Christ — their 
authority over the Church — the inclusion of Sts. 
Peter and Paul in their number." 1 What this 
martyr, Ignatius, says, his teacher, Poly carp, 
another martyr, says ; and Polycarp says that he 
took it from the lips of St. John, whose pupil he 
was. And what these martyrs say other martyrs 
— Eusebius , Justin , Origen , Tertullian — who 
lived at the same time with them, or shortly after, 
also say. It was only a little more than a hundred 
years after the crucifixion that Justin wrote ; and 
it has been well said that from his writings there 
w might be collected a tolerably complete account 
of Christ's life, in all points agreeing with that 
which is given in our Scriptures." So manifest 
is it that Christ and his apostles were real histori- 
cal persons, that the New Testament was written 
by the apostles and their attendants, that it was 
widely known and accepted as the message of 
God to men while they yet lived, and shortly after. 
They declared that they wrote and spoke by the 
1 Prof. George Kawlinsorrs " Historical Evidences." 



74 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

direction of God, and the}^ had no selfish or 
worldly object to gain. They turned their back 
on all worldly prospects, and cheerfully accepted 
hardship and suffering, not refusing a martyr's 
death, that they might publish abroad the words 
God had given them. They give such words as 
God alone could speak, and they describe deeds 
and events which transcend any power not divine. 
Not only did they seal their testimony at the stake, 
or in the arena, but their successors were equally 
ready to die for w 7 hat they had learned in their 
writings. Go down into the catacombs of Rome, 
walk through their nine-hundred miles of streets, 
consider that it is largely the dust of Christian 
martyrs which sleeps in those millions of graves, 
and what further need of witness can you have ? 
There is hardly a statement in the Old Testament 
or the New, but again stands out in emblem, 
picture, or inscription, on those deep-buried tombs. 
The Coliseum lifts up its vast and silent walls to 
tell us that our Bible is from God, and that 
thousands of noble women, scholars, tender and 
delicate youths, would rather be thrown to the 
lions than deny it. 

Not only have we the testimony of Egyptian 
and Assyrian monuments, and much written his- 
tory, especially that of Greece and Rome, but the 
very geography of Palestine testifies that the Bible 
is what it claims to be. Many Christians, waver- 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 75 

ing in their faith, have had that faith confirmed by 
going over Galilee and Samaria with the open 
Bible in hand. Unbelievers have been converted 
to Christ by studying the antiquities of Jerusalem 
and its neighborhood. If any one doubts that the 
Bible is a true history ; that its writers were 
honest men ; that they are what they claim to be, 
bearers of a revelation of God to us, let him go to 
the Holy Land, and there, from valley and hill, 
from sea and plain, from city and stream, from 
gardens and from graves, shall come a voice as the 
voice of many waters, turning his doubt into joy- 
ous faith. 

This external evidence, of which I have now 
given you but a few hints, is so vast, dear friend, 
as to be positively amazing. Like the Highland 
chieftain, we have only to stamp our foot, and 
swift witnesses start up, and gather about us, out 
of every department of ancient research. They 
declare that the Bible is not a human book, but 
divine ; that its writers are worthy of implicit 
belief, even when they say that they write under 
the guidance and control of God. These wit- 
nesses have many of them been hostile to God's 
kingdom on earth, have fought against his people, 
persecuted them, and put them to cruel deaths ; 
but this, so far from weakening their testimony, only 
makes it the more unanswerable, the more convin- 
cing, a more complete and final ending of all doubt. 



76 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

You remember that once, when our Lord had 
mercy on a poor demoniac, setting him free from 
the evil spirits which tormented him, even those 
spirits were constrained to testify that he was the 
Christ, the Son of the most high God. Thus it is 
that the monuments and annals of pagan races, and 
of kingdoms which have sought to displace our 
Lord's kingdom, nevertheless declare that he, and 
his words, and all whom he has inspired to speak 
concerning him, are God's chosen means by which 
he reveals himself to men. They send us such 
word, dear friend, as the wife of Pilate sent to 
him at the time of our Lord's trial. If we are 
tempted to reject the Bible, as the Jews were 
tempting Pilate to reject Jesus of Nazareth, let us 
remember her words. An artist has made a pic- 
ture in which is given, in marvellous coloring 
and perspective, what he imagined her to have 
seen in her dream. She is painted as seeing the 
whole future of Christianity, — its early struggles 
and martyrdoms, its growing successes, its power 
widening through the world, its final victories, 
and the glory and dominion which shall crown it 
when Christ returns. Something like this he 
imagines her to have seen in the visions of her 
bed, by which she was moved to send to Pilate 
the startling message, "Have thou nothing to do 
with that just man ; for I have suffered many 
things this day in a dream because of him." Like 



THE WITNESS OF UNINSPIRED MEN. 77 

this, my dear friend, is the message concerning 
our Bible which secular and even pagan history 
sends us to-day. 

As the damsel with the spirit of divination said 
of Paul and Silas, " These men are the servants of 
the most high God, which shew unto us the way of 
salvation," so the many witnesses which I have 
called up out of the dark places of heathenism say. 
And they speak thus not only of St. Paul and his 
companions, but of our blessed Lord, who is above 
all, and of the prophets, of Moses, of the annalists, 
and sweet singers of ancient Israel. " He shews 
unto us the way of salvation," they say, when we 
hear Christ declare, "Though I bare record of 
myself, yet my record is true." " Do nothing 
against those true and just men, for they show 
unto us the way of salvation," is still the united 
voice of these many witnesses, when we hear one 
of the apostles say, "That which was from the 
beginning, which we have heard, which we have 
seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, 
and which our hands have handled, — that Eternal 
life which w r as with the Father, declare we unto 
you." 



CHAPTER VI. 

TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 

We, in the last chapter, looked at the testi- 
monies to the truth of the Bible with which history 
abounds. The monuments and inscriptions of the 
buried past, and secular historians who were con- 
temporary with the writers of the Bible, certify to 
the accuracy of the Bible records. They tell us 
that what we read in our Sacred Book is worthy 
of implicit belief. Not only does God desire to 
reveal himself to us, and not only has he power 
to make such a revelation, and not only must the 
men who receive and write out this revelation be 
inspired of God to do it, but here we have a book 
which claims that it is a revelation of God to us, 
and whose writers claim to be inspired. The first 
of these claims, that the Bible is God's message 
to us, was sufficiently considered in the third 
chapter ; nor need the claim of the writers of the 
Bible, that they were inspired to write accurately 
what they wrote, now detain us long. We saw 
in the fourth chapter that from the nature of the 
case they must be inspired in order to be equal to 
their work, and the secular monuments and history 
78 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 79 

say that they should be believed if they claim that 
they wrote by inspiration of God. 

That they do make this claim is obvious on 
almost every page of the Bible. Moses and the 
prophets declared that they spake God's words to 
the people, and that in what they wrote down God 
guided and kept them. This claim of the Old 
Testament writers is not only conceded, but every- 
where insisted upon, in the New. St. Paul, 
writing to Timothy, says, "All Scripture is given 
by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doc- 
trine, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness ; 
that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly 
furnished unto all good works." Not less decisive 
than these words are those of Peter, where he 
says, referring to the Hebrew Scriptures, "The 
prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, 
but holy men of God spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost." Whenever the first preachers 
of Christ went among the scattered Jews, they 
began with the Old Testament as an accepted basis 
of truth, on which they and their hearers could 
stand together. And in this custom they but 
followed the example of Christ. He nowhere 
questioned the truth of the Old Testament ; he 
continually reasoned out of it ; he gave to its words 
a diviner meaning than many to whom he spoke 
had done ; he said, in his Sermon on the Mount, 
that he came not to destroy the law and the pro- 
phets, but to fulfil. 



80 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Christ wrote nothing himself. But he claimed 
to be far above that plane of inspiration on which 
the writers of the Bible stood. He was God 
dwelling in the flesh and speaking to men. He 
said that no man had seen God at any time, but 
that he, who dwelt in the bosom of God, had 
declared him. He declared not only that he spoke 
the truth, but that he was the truth. Unto Pilate 
he said, ?? To this end was I born, and for this 
cause came I into the world, that I should bear 
witness to the truth." And to another, who 
doubted who he was, he said, " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father, and how sayest thou, 
then, show us the Father?" Such was the su- 
preme claim which Christ made for himself; and 
not only this, but he made promises of special 
guidance to those who should record his words. 
Here is what he says, " These things have I spoken 
unto you, being yet present with you. But the 
Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the 
Father will send in my name, he shall teach you 
all things, and shall bring all things to your 
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." 
This was the promise, and the writers of the 
gospels and the epistles everywhere assume that 
it was fulfilled to each one of them. Our attention 
is again and again called to this fact. The apostles 
claimed so to speak the words of God that whoso- 
ever despised them despised not men but God, 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 81 

rf I have received of the Lord that which also I 
delivered unto you," said St. Paul to the Corin- 
thians. The form in which he began most of his 
letters, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the 
will of God," shows that he claimed to be speci- 
ally authorized to speak God's words to men. 
His lano*uao;e covers the whole case, both for 
himself, and all whom Christ commissioned, where 
he says, " We speak the wisdom of God in a 
mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God 
ordained before the world unto our glory, which 
none of the princes of this world knew, . . . but 
God hath revealed them unto us by his spirit. . . . 
We have received, not the spirit of the world, but 
the spirit which is of God, that we might know 
the things which are freely given to us of God ; 
which things also we speak, not in the words 
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy 
Ghost teacheth . . . for who hath known the 
mind of the Lord? but we have the mind of 
Christ." Thus explicitly do the writers of the 
Bible claim that they bring us a revelation of God, 
and that they give it to us in words which God 
has taught them. And we saw, in the last chapter, 
that the voice of antiquity, of contemporary his- 
tory, the very geography of Palestine, and the 
lives and deaths of those who claimed to come 
from God, all declare that their claim cannot be 
doubted, but that they are God's true and faithful 



82 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

witnesses to us. And we open the volume, and 
we find it, as we should expect to find a true 
revelation of God, — full of the supernatural, of 
miracles, of the very footprints and handiwork 
of God himself. 

But there is one proof that the Bible is God's 
book which I now wish especially to point out, 
and that is the fulfilment of prophecy. Men may 
guess at the future with more or less probability, 
but they cannot positively declare it. They may 
put together causes and influences which are at 
work on the plane of the finite, and confidently 
foretell what results will follow. But when they 
rise to the infinite, to events which neither men 
nor nature, but God alone must bring to pass, 
they know not anything, — not what shall be on 
the morrow, or what an hour may bring forth. 
When, therefore, we read in our Bible that God 
made known what he would do some time in the 
remote future, and find that he did as was so long- 
before predicted that he would, we must admit 
that the Bible is God's book ; especially must we 
admit this when we find that not one prophecy, 
nor two, but many, making a large part of the 
volume, came true ages or centuries after they 
were made. 

Observe that I now speak only of fulfilled pro- 
phecies, not of the unfulfilled. On this wide and 
uncertain sea I do not propose to embark. Nor 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 83 

do I undertake to make a list of the prophecies 
which have been clearly fulfilled. Possibly they 
are more, possibly less than I might think. No 
great rebellion or war takes place, and no states- 
man rises up to change the relations of states and 
kingdoms, but some will see in it the fulfilment of 
ancient prophecy. They may see rightly at times, 
but they do not always agree, they change their 
views ; the same prophecy has been applied to 
many different persons or events. In regard to 
the prophecies which are clearly unfulfilled, as 
those pertaining to the second coming of our Lord, 
I have nothing to say. It is not for me to say 
just when or just how they will be fulfilled. I 
know that they tell us of a wondrous and glorious 
reappearing, and with that I comfort my heart. 
I only wait and watch, leaving God to be his own 
interpreter. Some prophecies may be having 
their fulfilment in the present, as it is certain that 
others point on into the future ; but here, amid 
this confusion and uncertainty, is no ground on 
which to put an argument for the divine origin of 
the Bible. I go back, therefore, from all this to 
those prophecies which have already had their 
clear and final fulfilment ; whose voice, foretelling 
what should be in the ages to come, has been dis- 
tinctly responded to by the voice of history. 

First to be noticed among these are those early 
prophecies which relate to the calling, the growth 



84 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

and triumph, the captivity, the recall and the 
dispersion of the Jewish people. It was more 
than four hundred and fifty years before Joshua 
led Israel into Canaan that God came to Abraham, 
who was then at Bethel, and said to him, " Lift up 
now thine eyes, and look from the place where 
thou art, northward, and southward, and eastward, 
and westward : for all the land which thou seest, 
to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever. 
And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth : 
so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, 
then shall thy seed also be numbered. Arise, 
walk through the land, in the length of it, and in 
the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee." 
Here now is a distinct prophecy that Abraham's 
descendants should be very numerous, and that 
they should for a long time have possession of 
Canaan. Going dow r n the stream of time nearly 
five hundred years, we find that the Israelites have 
passed over Jordan, that they have driven out the 
Canaanites, and that it is said, "These are the 
countries which the children of Israel inherited in 
the land of Canaan, which Eleazer the priest, and 
Joshua the son of Nun, and the heads of the 
fathers of the tribes of the children of Israel, 
distributed for inheritance to them." Such is the 
record. All, from beginning to end, has taken 
place under God's ordering, and by his help, and 
in fulfilment of what he foretold to Abram, his 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 85 

friend. We do not see how it is possible for 
history to re-echo more surely the voice of pro- 
phecy ; and since it is a work of omniscience thus 
to foretell the future, the Bible must be God's 
book. 

Take next the prophecy concerning the bond- 
age in Egypt. God said unto Abram : " Know of 
a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land 
that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they 
shall afflict them four hundred years : and also 
that nation whom they shall serve will I judge, 
and afterwards shall they come out with great sub- 
stance." Was this prophecy fulfilled? Look for- 
ward two hundred years, and } r ou read this 
historical record : M And the sons of Israel carried 
Jacob their father, and their little ones, and their 
wives in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to 
carry him. And they took their cattle and their 
goods, which they had gotten in the land of 
Canaan, and came into Egypt, Jacob and all his 
seed with him." Pass on a little farther, and 
you read this : " Now there arose up a new king 
over Egypt, which knew not Joseph ; and he said : 
" The children of Israel are more and mightier 
than we. Come on, let us deal wisely with them. 
. . . Therefore did they set over them task- 
masters, to afflict them with their burdens." Still 
passing on two hundred years, you find this bit of 
history : " And Moses stretched forth his hand 



86 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

over the sea. . . . And the waters returned, 
and covered the chariots and the horsemen, and 
all the hosts of Pharaoh. . . . But the children 
of Israel walked upon dry land. ... And 
Israel saw that great work which the Lord did 
upon the Egyptians." Thus did the pen of his- 
tory, in the hand of Moses, write down the fulfil- 
ment of the prophecy to Abram, — the going 
down, all the oppression, and the mighty deliver- 
ance. 

How distinctly God has put his own mark on 
the Bible we shall again see if we read the 
prophecy which he put into the mouth of Balaam, 
who came to curse Israel, but was made to bless 
him. That prophecy was : ?? It shall be said of 
Jacob, and of Israel, what hath God wrought? 
Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and 
lift up himself as a young lion : he shall not lie 
down until he eat of the prey, and drink the 
blood of the slain." Was here a foretelling of the 
future such as God alone could do ? Go forward 
to the time of David and Solomon, and you shall 
see. Nearly six hundred years pass away, and in 
the victories of David, in the building of the 
temple, in the glory and wisdom which awoke the 
wonder of the Queen of Sheba, you find all that 
was told so long before coming to pass. You read 
the prophecy and the history, and you say : " This 
is not a human book, — this book is from God." 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 87 

Not only the growth, but the falling apart and 
decay of Israel were prophesied long before they 
came. The Lord said to Moses: "Behold, thou 
shalt sleep with thy fathers ; and this people will 
rise up and go after the gods of the strangers of 
the land, and will forsake me, and break my 
covenant. Then my anger shall be kindled 
against them, and I will forsake them, and they 
shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles 
shall befall them. Look forward five hundred 
years, and read the history of Israel from the time 
the nation was divided until the captivity at 
Babylon, and you see how true that early 
prophecy was. No man could have made it. 
Reasoning from cause to effect, looking at what 
God had done for Israel and was yet to do, we 
should have said that they could not fall away and 
be destroyed. The prediction was just contrary 
to all the probabilities in the case, yet it was ter- 
ribly fulfilled. 

It would take too much time even to point out 
the prophecies of the carrying away to Babylon, 
and of the return. They began to be uttered 
many years before the events took place, and you 
know how literally they came true. When you 
find what Isaiah and Jeremiah foretold coming to 
pass in the time of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, 
you are forced to recognize Him who sees the end 
from the beginning. 



88 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Turning now to another class of prophecies, 
relating to cities and nations, how do you account 
for the fact that their truth is so confirmed by his- 
tory ? How often men have predicted the decay 
of great cities, as London, Paris, New York, Bos- 
ton, — yet those cities flourish on ! Not so, how- 
ever, when God opens his mouth. He speaks, and 
it is done. Perhaps you have travelled in the 
East ; have sat amid the ruins of Tyre. If so, ask 
yourself whether it was man or God who said, 
twenty-five hundred years ago : " They shall be 
sorely pained at the report of Tyre. ... Is 
this your joyous city whose antiquity is of ancient 
days? The Lord of hosts hath purposed it, to 
stain the pride of all glory, and to bring into con- 
tempt all the honorable of the earth." 

If you have gone through the land of Egypt, 
have you not been obliged to own that it was not 
man, but God, who, two thousand years ago, said : 
" The daughter of Egypt shall be confounded ; she 
shall be delivered into the hand of the people of 
the North. Behold, I will punish the multitude 
of the land of No, and Pharaoh, and Egypt, with 
their gods and their kings." 

Perhaps no one of you has visited the site of 
ancient Babylon. It was so destroyed, and 
wasted, and buried out of sight long ago that men 
were uncertain w T here it stood. Yet centuries be- 
fore this wasting began, when all things seemed 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 89 

to favor the continuance of its power and glory, 
Jeremiah said of it : " Because of the wrath of the 
Lord it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be 
wholly desolate ; every one that goeth by Babylon 
shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues.'' 
Think you, as you see modern engineers bringing 
the ruins of Babylon out into the light, that Jere- 
miah was mistaken in saying that the words he 
spoke were not his own ; but words which God 
gave him to speak ? You know that he could not 
be mistaken. He did speak and write the counsel 
of God. 

Read the history of the city of Jerusalem, — its 
whole history, if you would see how r it fulfils early 
prophecies ; read its history since our Lord came 
in the flesh, and see how it fulfils his sad words, 
" He beheld the city and wept over it, saying. . . . 
the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies 
shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee 
round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall 
lay thee even with the ground, and thy children 
within thee, and they shall not leave in thee one 
stone upon another." You know how all this 
came true within a generation, so that the disciples 
had need to heed their Lord's w T ords as to what 
they should do when they saw Jerusalem com- 
passed with armies. Having read the sor- 
rowful words of the Master, and then seeing how 
literally histor}' fulfilled them all, you can but say, 



90 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

as some said while he was "in the flesh : K This is 
the Son of God : never man spake like this man." 
Turn again to the Messianic prophecies, which 
began in the garden of Eden and reached all 
through the Old Testament times. The promise 
was made to Eve that a deliverer should come. It 
was repeated to Abraham. Moses called special 
attention to it. It appears in the prophecy of 
Balaam ; Joshua and the law of Canaan were types 
of Christ. As we get further on we come to 
minute descriptions of the person and sufferings 
and reign of the Messiah. What but the power of 
Christ in the earth has ever answered to the words of 
the second Psalm ? In the twenty-second Psalm you 
read : " They part my garments among them, and 
cast lots upon my vesture." And then again, in the 
accounts of our Lord's crucifixion you read that the 
soldiers divided his garments among them by lot. 
Is this man's book, dear friend ? No, it is God's. In 
the hundred and tenth Psalm you find David saying : 
" The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my 
right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool." 
These words could not possibly be true of any 
human ruler, but they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, 
who is set down at the right hand of the majesty 
on high, — principalities and powers being subject 
unto him. Seven hundred years before Christ, 
Isaiah wrote the fifty-third chapter of his prophecy. 
What he then foretold has never come true but 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 91 

once, and it has been airfulfilled in our Lord Jesus 
Christ. He was despised and rejected of men ; he 
was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. 
The Lord did lay on him the iniquity of us all, and 
he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and 
poured out his soul unto death. Verily, these were 
the true sayings of God, which he took and gave 
unto his servant, whom he sent to speak of things 
which should so long after come to pass. 

But perhaps you say that the Jewish nation, to 
whom these prophecies came, regard them as yet 
unfulfilled. They do so regard them ; and in this 
there is nothing against our argument, but only the 
fulfilment of another ancient prophecy. Christ 
came as foretold, but the Jews did not see him, for 
there was a veil on their heart. They fulfilled the 
darkest of the prophecies concerning themselves ; 
nay, they made good what was foretold of Christ 
himself, by rejecting and mocking and crucifying 
him. For this blindness and hard-heartedness 
God scattered them, as we now see, among the 
nations, — according to what he said unto them 
of old, by his servants, the prophets. 

In the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah we read : 
tr The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he 
hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the 
weak ; he hath sent me to bind up the broken- 
hearted : to proclaim liberty to the captives, and 
the opening of the prison to them that are bound." 



92 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

And in the fourth chapter of Luke we read that 
Christ, near the beginning of his ministry, quoted 
these words to the people of Nazareth in the syna- 
gogue, on the Sabbath, and said: "This day is 
this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." The pro- 
phet Joel, writing nearly a thousand years before 
the day of Pentecost, said : " And it shall come to 
pass that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; 
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy ; 
your old men shall dream dreams ; your young 
men shall see visions." We pass on down the 
stream of time ; and after our Lord's ascension at 
Jerusalem, where the multitudes are astonished to 
hear the apostles speak with tongues, we find Peter 
quoting the ancient prophecy, and saying : " This 
is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel." 
On through apostolic history, through the labors of 
St. Paul we go, and at almost every step, in the 
giving of the gospel to the Gentiles ; in the trials, 
persecution, and martyrdom of the first Christians, 
we find some ancient prophecy coming true. We 
read history and prophecy side by side, and the 
more we read the more we wonder, and the more 
we wonder the more does our sound and unbiased 
reason point us heavenward, saying unto us, " Be- 
hold your God ! " 

In his history of the literature of Europe, Henry 
Hallam, speaking of the fact that the Bible was the 
first book printed after the invention of printing, 



TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHECIES. 93 

says: "We see in imagination this venerable and 
splendid volume leading the crowded myriads of 
its followers, and imploring, as it were, a blessing 
on the new art, by dedicating its first fruits to the 
service of heaven." Yes, my dear friend ; and as 
that mighty book, still leading on all other books, 
draws near to us to-day, we see around it, and all 
over and through it, a brightness which is not of 
this world ; and in the eager words of the Psalm 
we say : " Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be 
ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King 
of Glory shall come in." 



CHAPTER VII. 

WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 

I spoke, in the last chapter, of some of the 
prophecies of the Bible, and of the marvellous 
way in which they have been fulfilled. In this 
chapter I wish to allude to the history of the Bible 
in the world, — to what it has done and is still doing 
among men, — which is of so wonderful a character 
as to exalt it far above any or all other books. 

Egypt is a country in which it rarely rains. 
Yet the Nile is ever there, with its annual floods, 
making the land like a garden ; nor is the mystery 
solved till its sources, the great lakes lying near 
the equator, are taken into the account. So the 
Bible has flowed through history, a beneficent and 
fertilizing stream, and we can explain it only as 
we come to its sources, which are under the throne 
of God. 

No doubt there were other Hebrew books in 
ancient times. Some of them are mentioned in 
our Bible. Some of them, the Apocryphal books, 
are often seen in Bibles, put there by order of one 
of the later councils of the Romish Church, though 
without warrant either from the New Testament 
94 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DOXE. 95 

or the Old. Their inferiority to the more gener- 
ally accepted canon shows them to be wholly out 
of place. 

There were in the times of the apostles, or soon 
after, many writings on the subjects of which they 
treated. Some of those writings, pretended 
gospels and epistles, are still preserved as curi- 
osities. But they have no influence, no power ; 
they would have been forgotten long ago but for 
their connection with the Bible. The question 
arises, Why has that mass of ancient writings so 
generally perished, while the Bible not only sur- 
vives them all, but to-day has more freshness and 
power than it ever before had? The writers of 
the Bible were not so superior to all about them, 
in genius and culture, as to account for this vast 
difference. Most of them were wholly plain and 
unlettered men. Yet the writings of these men 
still lead the best thought of the world. You can 
explain their survival, and their wondrous energy, 
all the time increasing, in no other way so well as 
by admitting that God is with them, and speaks 
through them as through no other writings. Grant 

CO o 

that they are his revelation, and you know why 
they still live and move the world. 

This final resort to God to account for the con- 
tinuance and power of the Bible, is made more 
necessary when we look at the Hebrew nation as 
compared with those about it. Except for brief 



96 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

periods, chiefly in the times of Joshua and David, 
it was not a conquering nation. It was in subjec- 
tion to the mighty kingdoms near it during most 
of the immense period along through which the 
Bible was written. Its whole territory was in 
itself an insignificant patch of country. What 
were its cities, its learning, its arts, its achiev- 
ments, and glory, to those of Egypt and Assyria? 
If the Bible w r ere a human book we should expect 
its authorship to be Egyptian, Babylonian, or Per- 
sian. But it comes from the small and oft-ravaged 
Palestine. Here is a mystery which we can solve 
in but one way. If the Bible were merely a human 
book it ou^ht to come from the sreat centres of 
learning and renown. That it comes from Pales- 
tine is a witness to its divine authorship ; for God 
chooses the weak things to confound the mighty, 
and the foolish things to confound the wise. 

If we look farther out on these countries whose 
early literature has survived, — such countries as 
India, Greece, Italy, — we find our argument grow- 
ing stronger and stronger. Take the great classics, 
Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Plutarch, 
Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus. How much more 
influence than the writers of the Bible they should 
to-day have if all were alike as to inspiration. In 
the common use of the word, some of the classic 
writers were more inspired than the Biblical. 
They had greater natural genius, could think more 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 97 

profoundly and connectedly, could put their 
thoughts into more elegant forms of words. Yet 
what is the influence of them all to-day, compared 
with that of the Bible alone ? How many of them 
would continue to be read but for the Bible ? The 
Bible has been printed in all known languages of 
the w r orld, — they in how T few ! Copies of the Bible 
are sown broadcast by the million ; they are lim- 
ited to a few 7 choice libraries. And though the 
Bible is the most popular of books, it is more 
studied than any other by the intellectual leaders 
of our day. Is there any way but one in which 
you can account for this difference? God is in 
the book which unlettered men of a downtrodden 
race wrote. Nothing short of this could make it 
outlive the literature of Egypt, of Nineveh. It is 
a revelation of God, and therefore it to-day sways 
the world while the books of the proud Greek or 
Roman writers are comparatively powerless. 

Another fact in regard to the history of the 
Bible, which points to its divine authorship, is the 
vast mass of literature to which it has given rise. 
Not a little of this literature is in the form of 
attacks upon the Bible. But what other book 
have unbelievers ever thought it worth their while 
so to assail ? Almost all human books are challenged 
and criticised more or less when they first come 
forth from the press ; but how 7 soon the mind of 
the world concerning them is made up, and they 



98 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

either take their place among standard works or 
are forgotten ! Not so the Bible. Its enemies 
have fought against it thousands of years, nor are 
they yet agreed to let it alone. It is as formidable 
an object of attack as ever. It comes forth fresher 
and stronger out of every conflict. No other book, 
not all other books put together, have provoked 
so much criticism, — have died under the blows of 
the assailants after a little, or have ceased to pro- 
voke assaults. How do you account for this 
difference? Can you account for it save by ad- 
mitting that the Bible has a divine life, which 
cannot be destroyed? 

On the other hand, look at the books which have 
been written in defense of the Bible, or to expound 
and illustrate its teachings. What mighty libraries 
there are of them ! They began to multiply soon 
after the apostles died. Think of all the works 
of the Greek and Latin fathers, — how they mar- 
shalled their huge volumes at Alexandria, at 
Constantinople, at Rome ! The commentaries on 
the Bible, in all languages, and upon its smallest 
texts and w r ords, would, if gathered together, be 
a countless host. On each Lord's Day, and on all 
days in many places, what an army of preachers 
are speaking to the people out of the Bible ; and 
this has been so for more than fifteen centuries ; 
and to all this we must add the studies of the 
Sunday School and home, the religious magazine, 



WHAT THE BIBLE HA* BONE. 99 

newspaper, and review. And what are these to the 
great and ancient universities, with their thousands 
of Bible scholars all the time at work upon it, or 
on something nearly related to it, Go into the 
greatest libraries of Germany, of France, of Eng- 
land, of this country. Look at one small volume? 
perhaps lying on a table in the midst. Consider 
that that one small book has called into being a 
large part of the vast collections around it. Think 
of this, and remember that all other books together 
have not had such creative power, and then say 
whose work the Bible is. It cannot be man's - it 
must be God's own book. Look also at the mass* 
of literature which does not pretend to be Biblical 
or even religious, and see how that even, if it is 
good for anything, honors the Bible, and is full 
of thoughts and expressions borrowed from it. 
This book, which some would shut up, wholly 
banish from the schools in which our children are 
taught, was familiar to Shakespeare, as his works 
often and most strikingly show. It helped the 
thought and style of Milton, and gave him the 
theme of the grandest modern epic. Sir Walter 
Scott on his deathbed said, "There is but one 
book, — the Bible." Read not only Jeremy Taylor 
and John Bunyan, but Macaulay, Carlyle, the 
greatest orators, poets, philosophers, wherever the 
English language has been spoken since the Bible 
was translated into our tongue, and see what the 



100 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Bible has done for them. They are glad to speak 
their greatest thoughts, and point their sublimest 
sentences with its words. What other book has 
had such power over men in the higher depart- 
ments of thinking and of letters? Certainly no 
other. In this particular the Bible stands abso- 
lutely alone. And how do you explain the wonder? 
You cannot explain it but by admitting that the 
author of the Bible is God. It alone reveals him 
to men. His life is in it, quickening into life all 
his children to whom it comes. 

Not only does the life of the Bible throb in all 
good literature, but think what it has done for the 
noblest of the arts. Oh, that the ancient sculp- 
tors had known the Bible ! What a dignity it 
would have given to their genius, cramped as they 
were by their pagan mythology. Painting bloomed 
out as never before when the Bible was brought 
into the world of art. To it we owe the Madonnas 
of Eaphael, ending with that most wonderful of 
pictures, the Sistine Madonna. His cartoons are 
due to the miracles of Christ. The Transfiguration 
kindled his genius as nothing in common history 
ever did. And he is but one of the many whom 
the Bible has thus awaked. There is hardly a 
scene or event of marked character, from Genesis 
to Revelation, but some artist has wrought it into 
living and glowing forms. Go through the great 
galleries, where the works of the masters are 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 101 

treasured, and see what space is given to the Bible. 
It has been the inspiration, the guide, the foster- 
mother of art. In this no other book, nor all 
others, can compare with it. The magic pencil 
drops from the hand of art, and her works grow 
tame and cheap, when she turns from the Bible. 
Think of this, dear friends, and let it help you 
measure the gulf which separates the Bible from 
all human books. As of painting, so of music. 
Her noblest periods have been those in which she 
has drawn her subjects from the Bible ; her pro- 
ductions begin to grow weak and frivolous as soon 
as she turns to secular themes. We could not 
have had the immortal works of Handel, Mozart, 
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, but for the Bible. 
Now, is there not something wonderful in this? 
Think how many books have been w T ritten by 
famous geniuses ; yet the highest glory of music, 
of painting, of human letters, is due not to these, 
but to one small book, largely the work of humble 
men, which is older than the oldest of them, and 
which lives on while they perish, — all the time 
growing more fresh and powerful. Say that the 
Bible is God's book, and you account for this 
marvellous fact. The history of the Bible as thus 
far traced, and in contrast with other books, re- 
quires thai we should look on it as a divine 
revelation. 

But we have only begun this historic survey, 



102 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

dear friend. Consider the blessed transforming 
power which the Bible has everywhere shown in 
human society. It went through the length and 
breadth of the Roman Empire, in the hands and 
lives and on the lips of the first Christians. You 
know how mighty it was to the pulling down of 
strongholds. The effects it produced everywhere 
filled heathen minds with wonder. The polished 
Pliny, writing to his master Trajan, from Bithynia, 
said that the Christians " met on a stated day be- 
fore it was light, and addressed a form of prayer 
to Christ as to a divinity, binding themselves by a 
solemn oath ; not for any wicked purpose, but 
never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, 
never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when 
they should be called on to deliver it." This 
movement, which found its source in the Bible, 
soon became dangerous to the schemes of the 
emperors, and bloody and fiery persecution fol- 
lowed. But those believers in the words of Christ 
and the apostles could not be conquered. Their 
blood was a mighty seed. The empire itself be- 
came Christian a few generations after. Thus did 
the Bible once lift almost the whole world into a 
nobler and purer life. And how soon those old 
races sank back to their former level when the 
Bible was taken away ! We see them to-day, in 
many respects worse than when Christ came, be- 
cause their ambitious priesthood and rulers took 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 103 

from thern the key .of knowledge ; and still, again, 
they are beginning to rise to purity where that 
key, the Bible, in the hands and hearts of mission- 
aries, has been restored to them. Look on the 
results as seen now and in the past, and remem- 
bering that a tree is known by its fruits, ask your- 
self if this is not a tree which God has planted and 
made strong for himself? Most certainly it is, or 
there would be something else somewhere in the 
world worthy to be compared with it, as now 
there is not. 

Think of the barbarous condition of Northern 
Europe in the time of Julius Caesar. When he in- 
vaded England that country was overrun with 
tribes of hostile and warring savages. The religion 
of the Druids, with its horrid and bloody rites, 
held sway. When the Bible came, some centuries 
later, there still were heathen temples where 
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral now 
stand. There, and on the continent hard by, the 
people lived in caves, in wretched huts of mud and 
sticks, but scantily clad in the skins of beasts, 
their implements few and rude. Such was the 
state of things which met the first Christian mis- 
sionaries to those wilds. But they began to tell, 
beneath spreading trees or wherever any would 
listen to them, the story of that divine coming and 
speaking to men which the Bible records. Their 
teaching, and that of their successors, began to 



104 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

awake, in the souls about them, a divine life which 
had been hitherto dead. New ideas began to 
dawn upon those souls, new hopes and longings 
were kindled in them. What the law, the power, 
the grandeur of Eome could not do the Bible did. 
It came in the hands of men who had no selfish ob- 
ject to gain, in whom it had awakened a love 
which could make them die for the good of other 
men, ancl immediately the transformation began. 
The process has been at times slow, tortuous, now 
doubling and now redoubling its course, where the 
spirit and teaching of the Bible have been laid 
aside or overborne ; but it has, on the whole, gone 
forward and upAvard, reaching higher and higher 
terraces, till now we behold, in those once de- 
graded countries, some of the brightest proofs of 
the goodness and nobleness and greatness of which 
human nature is capable. Go to England to-day, 
and ask her what has made her what she is, and 
she will point you to the Bible : that, entering 
into her society, her schools, her literature, her 
institutions, her government and laws, has raised 
her from her savage state to what she now is. 
And she will not only point you to the Bible, but 
she will s&y, with a mighty emphasis, that no 
human book could have done so much for her, 
and that the Bible has been able to do it, only be- 
cause it is the message of God to her, as it is to 
all men. 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 105 

I wish I could here bring another witness, dear 
friend, from the history of the native races in this 
land. But I cannot, save in a very limited way. 
Even the Pilgrims a* Plymouth were not wholly dis- 
interested ; certainly the Puritans of Boston were 
not. They came less as missionaries than to make 
a place for themselves. I do not forget Eliot's In- 
dian Bible, and his work at Natick, which bore such 
good fruit. There are good men and women among 
us now, toiling and praying for the conversion of the 
Indians : nor have they toiled in vain, as the story of 
some Christian tribes may show. But it is still our 
shame that the most self-sacrificing missionaries the 
Indians of our country have ever had were the 
French Jesuits, who went into the wilderness by way 
of Quebec and Montreal, along the lakes, and down 
the Mississippi. However unwise or fanatical they 
were, this devotion has left a mark which English 
rule has not yet worn out. The Bible has not 
raised up the Indians in our borders for the 
sufficient reason that we have not, from the first 
and all along, given it to them out of a pure and 
unselfish love. Our treatment of them has made 
it a ghastly mockery when reached out to them by 
our hands. It looks very much as though we had 
lost our last chance of saving them. We cannot give 
them the Bible ; they must receive it from nations 
who have it in their heart. Let it come to them 
from hands unstained with their own blood, — from 



106 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

true and loving hands, whose love and truth have 
been clearly proved, — and then we shall see if the 
Bible does not show itself to be, among our Indian 
tribes, what it has elsewhere been, the wisdom of 
God and the power of God. 

Why should it not do for them what it did for 
the Sandwich Islanders, who savagely murdered 
the first visitors to their shores ? Roving and fight- 
ing cannibals less than a century ago, to-day a 
Christian nation ! And the Bible tells you why„ 
That kindled and fanned the spark which has been 
to them the light of life. Can anything be too 
hard for a book which Christianized the island of 
Madagascar so recently? Take that island as it 
was at the beginning of the century, and as it is 
now ; look on that picture and then on this, while 
you hear them say that the Bible has changed them 
from a multitude of savages to a Christian people, 
and ask yourself whence came this wonderful book ? 
Can it be any one's, save His with whom nothing is 
impossible ? As the Bible went to the Sandwich 
Islands and to Madagascar, finding them dark and 
cruel places and filling them with light and love, so 
it has gone and is still going to other islands of the 
deep and to the oldest civilizations of the East. I 
cannot here tell you the story of the Fiji Islands, 
whose very name has been with us a synonym of 
all that is wild, treacherous, and brutal. Such was 
their character fifty years ago. They hunted and 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS DONE. 107 

ate one another as we do our forest game. There 
was no baseness, no fury or lust of w T ild beasts of 
which they were not guilty, and proud to make it 
their boast. It is hard for us to realize how utterly 
all that has been changed. The Bible went to 
those devourers of one another early in this cen- 
tury, carried to them by those devoted men, 
Williams and Hunt ; and to-day guide-books of 
the Fiji Islands, for the use of persons travelling in 
search of knowledge or pleasure, are published. 
You look on that picture and then on this, tracing 
the wondrous change to the Bible, and you say : 
r? This is not man's doing ; what hath God wrought 
with his own all-conquering book ! " 

In 1848 Dr. John Geddie went to the New Heb- 
rides; and he died in 1872, only twenty-four 
years later. Yet in the church where he preached 
there has just been placed a tablet, with this in- 
scription : — 

"When he came here, . 
There were no Christians ; 
When he went away, 
There were no heathens." 

I should be glad to give more of these proofs, 
drawn from the history of the Bible in the world, 
that God is with it, and in it ; but I must keep 
within my limit. 

I should do wrong not to allude to the story of 
the mutineers of the ship "Bounty," who settled on 



108 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Pitcairn's Island in the Southwest Pacific. This 
ship had been at Tahiti Island for several months, 
gathering slips of the bread-fruit tree, which were 
to be transplanted in the West Indies. The 
vicious and lazy sailors found such delights at 
Tahiti that they did not wish to quit it ; went on 
board in a sullen mood, and soon after, on some 
provocation, mutinied. All but the mutineers 
were put out of the ship into an open boat, with a 
little food and water, and then the ship sailed back 
to Tahiti. But being afraid to stay there, where 
vessels often came, they again went on board, 
with several of the islanders, and sailed away in 
search of a home. The home which they finally 
chose was Pitcairn's Island. They ran the ship 
ashore, took out of it what they could carry away, 
and then burnt it to the water. On this island, 
where nature had food and a delicious climate for 
them, they hid themselves in a high, beautiful 
valley, and there quarrelled and fought till they 
were all dead but one. This one found himself 
at the head of a colony of less than twenty persons, 
most of them women and children. Of course, 
fighting then ceased. With quiet came reflection, 
and with this the sense of sin. The one surviving 
mutineer bethought him of a Bible which had been 
saved from the ship. He found it, and read it, 
and began to pray over it, till his murderous soul 
turned in penitence to God. The poor creatures 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS BONE. 109 

about him saw the wondrous change. He had 
become another man ; and they were full of joy 
at the change, for now their lives were safe. He 
began morning and evening prayers, and had 
public worship on Lord's Days, all of which the 
whole colony attended as one family. The chil- 
dren grew up, families were founded, all vice 
came to an end ; the people were in sympathy 
with their leader, and like him took their rules of 
life from the Bible. The result was marvellous. 
Years after, when the colony had grown to nearly 
a hundred persons, and had become known, 
visitors were astonished at what they saw. It 
seemed to them the very paradise of God, — so 
truthful, so honest, so peaceful, so industrious, 
so gentle and pure and holy were all its members. 
One bad man from near Boston, visiting them and 
seeking to do them harm, was warned of his 
wickedness by them, and turned into a devout 
Christian through their efforts. The small island 
becoming too strait for them they were persuaded 
to go back to Tahiti, which the older of them still 
remembered, where was plenty of room. But 
the vices and sins which they there saw so shocked 
them that they refused to stay, and went again 
to Pitcairn, saying they would rather their bodies 
should starve than their souls be lost ; that their 
colony should become extinct than that it should 
fall back into the corruption it had once escaped. 



HO NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

I need not speak of their story farther. What 
that one Bible did, as now shown, is enough for 
my purpose. All merely human books could not 
have done what it accomplished. The story shows 
us that none are so base but the Bible can lift 
them to purity and peace, where they let it come 
into their hearts. It can change darkness to light, 
chaos to order, hatred to love, sin to holiness 
before God. When you bring me another book 
which has done what the Pitcairn Bible did, and 
which is wholly fhe work of man, I may admit 
that the Bible can be ranked with other books ; 
but until you do this, I am forced to insist that the 
Bible came down to men from God, or it could 
not so lift them up to God. Its history, the story 
of its triumphs for four thousand years, the won- 
derful and blessed transformations it has wrought 
in all the earth, are the darkest riddle of the ages 
if it be but human. But admit that it is from 
God, and all is plain. 

As the thunder spoke in the sky above our 
Lord's head, saying, " This is the Son of God," so 
a great voice out of all the past, and from the ends 
of the world, to-day speaks, saying, "This is that 
revelation of God, full of the renewing life of God, 
which was to come into the world. We cannot 
doubt it any more than Andrew doubted that 
Jesus was the Christ when he ran to tell his own 
brother Simon, or Philip when he found Nathaniel 



WHAT THE BIBLE HAS BONE. 111 

under the fig-tree. As the woman of Samaria 
believed that Jesus was the Messiah, when she 
heard him tell her all that she ever did, so we, 
looking at the Bible, seeing it coming down the 
ages, leading captivity captive, walking over the 
graves of its assailants, say, "This is that true 
word of God, shining as a light in dark places, to 
which we do well to take heed." If you are 
against the Bible, and its divine Author, and the 
Saviour who comes in it, I pra}' you, "Kiss the 
Son, lest he be angry with you, and you perish 
in the way with him when his wrath is kindled but 
a little." But if you have committed your soul 
in well-doing to him, whose kingdom the Bible is 
setting up in all the earth, then work and w^ait in 
joyous hope ; for the end of all things, which is at 
hand, is but the ending of every form of violence 
and ungodliness among men, and the beginning 
of a glory which shall bring heaven to earth and 
raise earth to heaven. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 

If I were a lawyer in a civil court, pleading for 
the proposition that our Bible is God's message to 
men, it seems to me that I might here be content 
to let the jury take the case. I have shown that 
the Bible has been doubted no more seriously than 
many other truths which are axiomatic, self-evident, 
necessary. Our idea of God is such that we know 
he must desire to reveal himself to us, in order 
that he may save us from our miseries and sins. 
This he can do, the fabric of natural law not shut- 
ting him away from us, inasmuch as he made 
nature, and made it in view of what he would 
desire to do for us. Any revelation from him is, 
therefore, from the nature of the case, miraculous ; 
and a book which had in it no record of miracles 
could not be God's word. But a history of 
miracles must necessarily be beyond the reach of 
created minds : hence the need of special inspira- 
tion ; that is to say, God must himself guide and 
control those who write out his revelations for the 
use of others. And then, not only are these ex- 
pectations and conditions met in our Bible, but it 
claims to be a divine revelation, and secular history 

112 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 113 

and antiquities confirm this claim. Besides all this, 
the fulfilment of prophecies which we find in the 
Bible proves it to be divine, and it has had a career 
in the world which we can account for only on the 
ground that it is God's book. 

But these evidences, convincing as they might 
be in a court of law, are for the most part merely 
external, — what various persons and things and 
ideas witness concerning the Bible : we have not as 
vet looked at the drift and meaning of the book 
itself. We have seen the outside of the building, 
have looked into its vestibule, have heard echoes of 
the music and worship inside ; and if these show that 
it can be none other than the house of God, what 
must our impressions be as we pass in through the 
portals ; as we stand under its high arches ; as we 
tread its solemn aisles ? All true preaching is of 
the very essence of these internal evidences ; you 
will therefore only expect me to hint at some of 
the more obvious of them, falling farther short of 
what might be said in this part of my subject than 
in what has gone before. I will limit myself, in 
the chapters to come, to what the Bible has to say 
of man, of God, of the moral order of the w T orld, 
and of deliverance from evil and sin. 

If we begin with man, and inquire what the 
Bible has to say about him, we find it confirming, 
and widening, and deepening our natural know- 
ledge, in a way that no human book has ever done. 



114 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

What is man ? Is he body or spirit ? Does our 
whole humanity come out of the flesh ; or does it 
simply use the flesh for a little while? Is our 
higher nature from beneath, or is it from above and 
made to be the lower nature's lord? The answer 
to this question which we bring with us into life, 
which is embedded among the very roots of our be- 
ing, cannot be mistaken. Our own souls tell us 
that in the things which go to make us men or wo- 
men we are not related to the clod. Not only are 
we above the worm and all beasts and creeping 
things, but we belong to a wholly distinct order of 
life. You may trace resemblances of physical 
structure and of natural instinct between us and 
the lower animals, but there is that in us which 
there is not in them. The appearance of anything 
like mind or soul in them does not lift them to our 
plane. We have personality as they have not. 
That in us which we mean when we use the pro- 
noun / is not in them. We are spiritual, not ma- 
terial. We make use of matter, but are not of it. 
No speculations of natural science will ever beat 
this faith out of us. It may be confused, blinded, 
unable to answer the questions of the materialist, 
but it cannot be destroyed. 

That we came down from the Father of lights, 
and are essentially spiritual, is to us more sure than 
anything else. It is the foundation of all our 
other knowledge. Make us doubt this, and we 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 115 

must refuse to believe anything. Such is the soul's 
own testimony that it is itself a spark out of the 
infinite and divine flame. This is what the human 
consciousness says, not only where the Bible has 
gone, but where it has not gone. Men must be 
sunk into the very grave by their ignorance, their 
vice, their bondage to the lower nature, who do not 
insist on this. Eaise them up, quicken them, 
kindle their inner nature into life, and that they 
are essentially spiritual and from above, is one of 
the first truths which will leap forth and shine and 
cry out within them. Any book which does not 
recognize this peculiarity in them, or which tries to 
explain it away, their first impulse is to cast from 
them with horror. It is the serpent invading their 
Eden, whispering its temptations into their ear, 
planting its snare by the very tree of life. It may 
be more subtle than any other beast of the field, 
but souls which are awake to their worth will say 
to it, w We may not eat what you offer us ; " nor 
will they be beguiled from that answer till made 
false to themselves. 

But our Bible brings us no such temptation ; it 
plants no such snare. It does not come to the 
lower nature in us, but to the higher, — to what is 
best, and not to what is worst. It tells us that 
our first and most awful impression of man, of 
ourselves, is wholly right. We are spirits ; we 
are from above. What is graven on the soul, 



116 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

what all men naturally believe, what flames out in 
our consciousness more, the more We are awake, 
that the Bible confirms ; that the Bible clears up, 
widens, deepens, makes more solemn and impres- 
sive to us than it was before ? As soon as you 
look into this book you find it declaring that man 
is a spirit, and that he is of divine origin. It re- 
cognizes his frailty, his bondage to death ; it calls 
him a worm, the grass of the field, the flower that 
is cut oflf. But all this is said with reference to the 
fleshly nature, which is no part of the real and im- 
perishable man. When we come to the 1, the 
myself, which our inmost thought reveals to us, 
the voice of the best-trained consciousness is not 
so loud and clear as that of the Bible. On its 
first page we find these words : " And God said, 
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ; 
and let them have dominion over the fish of the 
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the 
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every 
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So 
God created man in his own image ; in the image 
of God created he him, male and female created 
he them." This account of the creation of man in 
the first of Genesis is repeated in the second chap- 
ter in such a way as more especially to emphasize 
his spiritual nature. There we read: "And the 
Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, 
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OE MAN. 117 

and man became a living soul." God imparted of 
his own life, that is, to man. He was made to 
live in a wholly different way from the lower 
orders of creatures. God did not breathe his 
breath into tliem, but the waters and the earth at 
his word brought them forth. Other creatures were 
made by the operation of nature ; but man was an 
inbreathed spirit, — a living soul, a spark out of 
God's own life, — so that he could be truly said to 
be made in the image of God. Thus is our neces- 
sary faith in the original dignity and inherent 
worth of man wholly confirmed. 

Not only is our natural self-knowledge con- 
firmed, but its sphere is widened, and the source 
of our consciousness of a spiritual nature is re- 
vealed. It is because we are God's children that 
we have in us the ideas of beauty, of order, of 
righteousness, and are blessed only as we find 
those ideas realized. Our wretchedness in a world 
of disorder, and while conscious of our own faults, 
is a witness to the spirit in us which is God's 
child. The Bible accounts for this higher nature 
of man, and reveals to us its riches of capacity and 
hope, as no merely human book has ever done. 
The mystery is cleared up, and we shout Amen, 
while our souls leap for joy when the bright sun 
of God's word rises upon us. There is healing in 
its wings. Now w^e know, as never before, what 
is the source of all that yearning, that wondering, 



118 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

that high imagining, that deep sense of want, that 
restlessness, that anguish and crying out for some- 
thing not yet ours, which make up our inmost 
and unspoken life. The Bible floods those depths 
in us with its light, makes the Sphinx within us 
tell her own riddle, so that we tremble with glad- 
ness when it says that God kindled our spirit from 
his own. 

And this sun which rises so brightly upon us at 
first does not afterwards go down. The farther 
we look through the pages of the book, the more 
clearly does it shine out. The words in Job 
which say, " There is a spirit in man, and the in- 
spiration of the Almighty giveth them understand- 
ing," re-echo those spoken in the beginning. 
David, looking on our poor mortal frame, wonders 
at the blessed truth : " What is man that thou art 
mindful of him, and the son of man that thou 
visitest him ? for thou hast made him a little lower 
than the angels, and hast crow T ned him with glory 
and honor." What is thus spoken the prophets 
speak with clearer voice, and what was a mystery 
in the Old Testament is unfolded in the New. 
The wondrous human spirit, with all its high ideas 
and possibilities, comes to perfection in Jesus of 
Nazareth. He, the perfect man, knew what the 
soul is, as we, with our dim vision, do not know, 
and he it was who said, " What shall it profit a 
man, though he gain the whole world and lose his 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 119 

own soul ? or what shall a man ^ive in exchange 
for his soul?" It is therefore certain, dear friend, 
so far as our present topic is concerned, that the 
Bible can never he displaced by any other book. 
It has exhausted all the possibilities in the case. 
We vaguely dream of the high origin of the spirits 
in us ; the Bible takes up those dreams, translates 
them into glorious truth, and raises them to a 
point where they blend with the life of God. 

In what the Bible says of man's immortality, as 
in what it says of his inherent dignity, it confirms 
our natural knowledge : it not only confirms it, 
but increases it, and puts it in a clear and proper 
light. We should believe in our immortality if 
we had no Bible. We brin^ the idea of immor- 
tality with us into life. It is not first taught us. 
We have it before we have any teachers. It is 
engraven on the tablets of our hearts. We can- 
not help believing that we are immortal, however 
much we try. Do you ask me, then, why all 
children do not think of themselves as immortal 
till told that they arej why books are written to 
disprove the immortality of the soul? why many 
savage tribes seem to have no idea of any life but 
the present? These facts can be accounted for 
easily enough, without denying that the idea of 
immortality is in all mem 

I think children are conscious of it before they 
speak it. The idea is in them, or it could not so 



120 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

easily be taught them. Their souls leap forth to 
embrace it as soon as they hear any one give it a 
voice. They have many other ideas, of which 
they are, from the first, vaguely conscious, but 
which they have not learned to speak. There is 
in them the idea of beauty, of truth, of duty, of 
the right as always right. These ideas, and that 
of immortality also, they put into conceptions, and 
speak forth as soon as you give them the proper 
words. That they are immortal is a faith enshrined 
within them, — a precious inheritance which God 
gives them with their being itself. 

But books have been written against immor- 
tality. Yes, and so have they- been written against 
everything else which is true, or which man natu- 
rally believes. Man is a curious compound, a 
strange contradiction. He has a will of his own, 
by which he may turn himself any way, as * their 
rudders turn the ships. Not only this, but out 
of his lower nature there comes up a tendency to 
err, a passion for darkness, a wanton love of vain 
speculations. As in the sea there is often an 
undercurrent running just the opposite way of the 
surface-current ; as in the air the wind near the 
earth may blow one way, and just the other way 
in its upper depths, so there may be in man the 
instinctive faith of immortality together with the 
flat denial of it in theory and logic The man 
who says that he does not believe that he is 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 121 

immortal does not know himself, or has forgotten 
himself. He did thus believe before ever he 
doubted, and the remains of the belief are in him 
still. He was led away by some fondness for 
debate, or by the desire to formulate in words of 
his own what God has graven on his heart. His own 
arguments and speculations gathered like mould on 
the divine handwriting. He went sounding on a 
dim and perilous way till darkness filled him. He 
allowed himself to take a false position, and then 
his pride of opinion led him to hold it with all his 
strength. His logic proved more than a match 
for his faith, though his faith was true and his 
logic false. Thus it is that you may get all your 
books, lectures, or other denials of immortality, 
and the traces of the God-given faith still be in 
the soul. It is there, in the soul of the most 
sceptical, however rubbed away or covered up. 
That faith is a part of our manhood ; and if we 
were wholly without it, we should not be men, but 
brutes. 

The conviction of their immortality is only 
effaced or hidden in savage tribes. It is never 
wholly gone, as careful searching has shown. 
The savage may stare and shake his head when 
you tell him that the soul never dies. Yet the 
thought rivets his attention, his eye kindles with it 
as it is made clear to him, and at length he begins 
to see that in his very superstitions there is an 



122 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

unconscious admission of the idea. He is con- 
scious of it as soon as he is clearly conscious of 
any ideas at all. Nothing can be surer, then, than 
that we all have the idea of immortality, and that 
we cannot get away from it, however hard we try. 
Probably no man ever tried harder to do this than 
the poet Byron, at times. Yet we find even him 
using these words : — 



■*© 



"I feel my immortality o'ersweep 
All pains, all tears, all time, all fears ; and peal, 
Like the eternal thunders of the deep, 
Into my ears this truth — Thou liv'st forever.' ' 

And now see how the Bible here speaks, how 
in accordance with the nature of things, as we 
expect God to speak on this subject, confirming 
our faith in man's immortality, and bringing the 
truth out into a clear light, as no man could do. 
The Bible nowhere tries to prove our immortality 
as something wholly new to us. It assumes the 
great truth, takes it for granted, rather, as why 
should God not do, who knows that he has written 
it on our hearts ? Some have tried to show that 
the earlier Hebrews knew nothing of this doctrine ; 
that they brought it back with them from Babylon. 
But this is certainly a mistake, for Christ quoted 
God's words to the patriarchs as showing that 
they believed the doctrine. The translation of 
Enoch and Elijah, aye, even the necromancy and 
witchcraft into which God's people fell, imply a 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 123 

life be} r ond this life in the flesh, in which those 
early men believed. If less is said toward the 
beginning of the Old Testament than toward the 
end, and less in the Old than in the New Testa- 
ment, there is ^ood reason for this. The doctrine 
was taught in Egypt, where Israel had been, and 
was connected with man}' idolatrous rites. It was 
held by the corrupt nations round about Israel. 
It tended to degenerate into a gross spiritism, as 
in the case of Saul and the witch. 

Now, God would save his people from these 
abuses of the doctrine, — from the Egyptian and 
other corruptions, to which they were so prone. 
He therefore withdrew their minds somewhat to 
the worship and duties of this life ; he did not 
give them the doctrine till he had trained them to 
know how to use it, just as he did not send his 
Son till after long ages of preparation. But the 
idea was more or less spoken by inspired writers 
all along. In the later prophets, when the Jews 
had been thoroughly weaned from idolatry, it 
came out more clearly ; in the words of our Lord 
and of his apostles, it burst in all its fulness upon 
the world. No grandest symphony of human 
voices, borne up on sublimest organ strains, ever 
stirred the soul like those words spoken at the 
grave of Lazarus, like those in which St. Paul 
paints the heavenly life of those whose bodies are 
sleeping in the grave. 



124 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

The Bible, then, utters forth, as no merely human 
books ever have or can, that idea of immortal life 
which is in us all. It takes up the subject so 
wisely, treats it so masterfully, speaks so pro- 
foundly and clearly, and so carries our thoughts 
out to all we need or wish to know% that our 
hearts compel us to see in it the true God and 
eternal life. No man ever thus wrote on the 
subject of immortality. We take up the book 
which has been proved to be the word of God, 
and, finding these words in it, we say, "It is none 
other than his ; these are indeed the true sayings 
of God." 

On one other point pertaining to man, the Bible 
has much to say. Not only is he immortal, and a 
spirit made in God's image, but he has thrown 
himself out of harmony with the moral universe, 
to which he belongs. He is at war with the moral 
order of the world. Here again is something 
which we should know of if we had no Bibles, — 
something which the Bible does not announce as a 
new fact, something which we naturally know, and 
which the Bible only emphasizes and brings clearly 
out into the light. The Bible is from God, and, 
viewing men in their relation to God, it calls the 
evil in them their sin, though we may call it by many 
other names. We say that man is naturally out of 
place ; he is not in the element for which he was 
made ; he is a planet wandering from his proper 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 125 

orbit. We are all the time conscious of a power 
to do vastly better thau we do. We do not follow 
that which is best in us, but go against it. Where 
there are exceptions to this fact, they are due to 
some influence which has come into men and 
changed their course. Looking on the mass of 
men, or taking them as they naturally are, we are 
constrained to say that they do not live in a 
manner which is worthy of them. The earthly, 
and selfish, and frivolous lives which they live are 
as much beneath them as it is beneath the eagle to 
leave his proper home in the air, and burrow like 
a fox. 

Human society is organized on the presumption 
that men are inclined to disobey their higher 
nature. Safeguards, restraints, and punishments 
are put all about us, that we may be protected 
from one another, that the evil bent in us may be 
held in check. We are glad of these warnings and 
helps, — glad of anything which keeps us from 
sliding away downward, or which forces us up to- 
ward the life for which God made us. Such is 
the verdict which we pass on human life as a 
whole, where that life is unchecked and un- 
changed. 

Now, see how exactly the Bible confirms and ex- 
plains all this. It does not paint man any better 
than we know him to be. It paints him as he is. 
It is clearly the work of one who knows what is in 



126 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

man. It reveals all the depths of human sinful- 
ness, as only he who made man could possibly do. 
It tells us how men have reached their present low 
plane : they are fallen beings. That is to say, 
they have ceased to have fellowship with God, for 
which his image in them fitted them. They have 
not lived with him as his children, but have gone 
away, and become estranged. They have fallen 
under the power of the fleshly nature, and are liv- 
ing in a way wholly unworthy of their spiritual 
nature. This, briefly told, is what the Bible says 
of the fall of man. You see how exactly it agrees 
with the fact of man's essential nobleness, and with 
the sad state of things which we see around us in 
the world. Human wickedness is accounted for 
and drawn forth into the light as nowhere else. 
We turn over the pages of the Bible and we say, 
" These are not the words of men, but of one who 
knows us altogether." When we read that " our 
heart is deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked," we not only confess the truth of the 
charge, but feel that he who made the heart has 
searched it with an eye that sees all things. David 
asks God to cleanse him from faults of which he is 
unconscious ; and the way of a man is to be 
w cleansed " by taking heed to God's word. The 
book shows who its author is by the wholly divine 
way in which it speaks of the sinfulness of men. 
They are just such words as we should expect the 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MAN. 127 

heart-searching God to utter where we read of 
men : " They are all gone out of the w^ay ; they are 
together become unprofitable ; there is none that 
doeth good; no, not one." We should not dare 
bring this charge against our fellows, and only as 
we rise into full sympathy with God do we see how 
true it is. It can be nothing less than the word of 
God in which we read : w All souls are mine, the 
souls of the righteous and of the wicked ; the soul 
which sinneth, it shall die." None but God could 
say this, which we see to be profoundly true. 
The souls of the wicked are his, for he is the 
Father of spirits ; and they die when they sin, since 
sin separates them from him who is the source of 
their life. 

Thus it is, my dear friend, that the Bible reveals 
God to us in the wonderful revelation of ourselves 
to us which it makes. We see none other than 
God in what it says of our high origin ; in what it 
says of our great destiny ; in what it says of our 
bitter estrangement from God — to all of which I 
have but briefly referred. 

The woman of Samaria believed that Jesus was 
the Christ because he told her all that she ever did. 
He told her how wicked she had been, how un- 
worthy of herself she had lived ; and she bowed 
under his true words in penitence and faith. May 
God make her the example which you shall even 
now follow ! The Bible tells you, as God alone 



128 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

could, whence you came, whither you are bound, 
and what you now are. You have the sense of 
weariness, and the hunger and thirst, which tor- 
mented her. No water drawn from any earthly 
well, though it were that to which Jacob led his 
flocks, can quench the gnawing fire in your soul. 
But the water which God gives, and which springs 
up into everlasting life, comes to you in the Bible. 
That the Bible brings you this water, it proves by 
the way in which it lays open the depths and 
windings of your heart. Would you drink of that 
of which if one drink he shall not thirst again? 
Then do as the woman did. As she saw in Christ 
her master and saviour, so, dear friend, may you 
see in the book which speaks to you of Christ 
the true God and eternal life. As the men of the 
city came out at the saying of the woman, so let all 
men come to this book, and see how it reveals 
them to themselves, and they will be ready to say : 
?f These are the true sayings of God, in which he 
tells us how sadly we have wandered into sin, 
while he lovingly waits to hear our repentances, 
and forgive and bless." 



CHAPTEE IX. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 

The internal evidences for the Bible, like the 
external, are inexhaustible. I showed a little in 
the last chapter how the Bible speaks concerning 
man. It speaks in such a way as we should 
expect God to, — confirming our previous knowl- 
edge of human nature, and opening in it new 
depths which we at once recognize as a part of 
our real life. We are more or less conscious of 
high spiritual powers ; with that consciousness the 
Bible everywhere agrees, and accounts for it as 
human reasoning never could, by carrying it up to 
God, who is the Father of our spirits. We have 
also an instinctive feeling that we are immortal ; 
this feeling the Bible everywhere assumes as true, 
and it brings clearly out into the light the life and 
immortality of which we are faintly conscious. 
We read what it says of the future and the unseen, 
and, with awed and gladdened hearts, we say, 
"Never man spake thus: this is God's voice." 
And not only are we spiritual and immortal, but 
we are sinful. It is a truth of our observation 
and of our experience that men are not in harmony 

129 



130 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

with the law of their being. We find them at 
war with that law, out of their orbit, not naturally 
rising towards God, but struggling away from him 
into death. This much we know without the 
Bible ; but the Bible confirms it, takes it for 
granted, restates it with a thoroughness and power 
of which man is not capable. The longer we listen 
the deeper does our conviction become that God 
is speaking to us. 

I pass now from what the Bible says of man to 
what it says concerning God. The great theme 
of the Scriptures is God himself; they are a reve- 
lation of him, if they are anything. His presence 
fills them as the sunlight fills the planetary spaces. 
This fact itself falls in with the idea that the Bible 
is from God. God is its theme, as he is the theme 
of no other book. Everywhere it brings him 
before us as the Being of beings whom we need 
to meet face to face. It confirms our .previous 
knowledge of God, and adds to it in a way so 
above all human power that we naturally say, while 
reading it, ?? These are the words of God.*" 

The fact that the Bible does not try to prove 
the existence of God, but takes it for granted, is 
a proof of its divine origin. It sometimes alludes 
to those who say there is no God, but, instead of 
arguing with them, it calls them " fools." It 
declares that all men have knowledge of God, 
both reflected from the outer world and written in 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 131 

their hearts. If any are at all without that knowl- 
edge, this is not because they never had it, but 
because they have disliked to retain it in their 
thoughts. Their foolish mind has been darkened 
by turning away from God, and worshipping and 
serving the creature. Thus does the Bible put 
the case of those who deny that there is a God, 
It does not argue with them any more than we 
argue with a blind man about colors, or with a 
deaf man about sounds and voices. It undertakes 
the rather to open their eyes that they may see, 
and to unstop their ears that they may hear. 

Now this is a most remarkable thing in the 
Bible. This makes it unlike the vast mass of 
books which speak to us about God. These are 
continually trying to prove that there is a God, 
whereas he is the truth of truths, whose existence 
is above all proof. He comes with us into the 
world, and he never leaves nor forsakes us. This 
is every year getting to be more and more the 
common faith of mankind. Men would never have 
tried to prove that there is a God, if they had not 
been first blinded by reason of sin. I would do 
full justice to our painstaking thinkers who have 
constructed now this argument, and now that, for 
the existence of God. Their labors have grown 
into many a portly volume, which does much credit 
to their acuteness, their research, their depth and 
breadth of thought. The preacher often has occa- 



132 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

sion to use their facts and reasonings when he 
would confirm the faith of his hearers or his own 
faith. Then, again, if we would bring men to God, 
we must meet them on their own ground. When- 
ever they have sunk down through a process of 
doubting till they have reached the low level of 
atheism, we must address to them such arguments 
as they will listen to, if we would see them in- 
tellectually convinced. But I think it better that 
we should not be too anxious about this intellectual 
conviction ; it will come fast enough, if the heart 
be first reached. 

Persons are apt to be repelled farther and 
farther into atheism by arguments addressed only 
to the head. Young men, who never had thought 
of doubting the divine existence, have come out 
of the theological schools confirmed atheists. Oh, 
that they might have been kept in a warm, religious 
atmosphere ; that they might have been under 
instructors who taught them to commune with 
God, rather than lean to their own understanding ! 
Then, the spiritual life in them being thoroughly 
alive, it would have been impossible for them to 
doubt. What is needed to save the young from 
skepticism is not argument, but a larger inbreath- 
ing of the Holy Spirit. Let there be not merely 
a religious excitement now and then, but a genuine 
revival of religion in all our schools every year, 
■and the crop of doubters would be very light. A 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 133 

great many atheists have been made by our trying 
to prove that there is a God. If we would just 
assume that God is, and that all men naturally 
believe in his existence ; and if we would meet 
men at this point, and clear up and strengthen 
the faith already in them, there would be but 
little need of other argument. 

And just here it is that the Bible meets all men. 
With a wisdom which is more than human, which 
is supernatural and divine, it brings out into the 
clear light of their consciousness that belief in 
God which men already have. The grand object 
in calling Abraham was not to teach that there is a 
God, but to have a people in the earth who should 
have correct views of God. Men had degraded 
God in their conceptions of him, and had fallen 
into idolatry. The noblest and truest thing in 
them, — their yearning for him, — being blinded, 
was misleading them into the worship of the 
powers of nature, and of beasts and creeping 
things. The Bible, everywhere assuming that 
men have a faith in God of some sort, comes to 
them just as they are, and tries to make them see 
what the true God is. It would rescue them from 
idolatry by revealing him to them. The object 
all along is not to show them some new thing, but 
to save them from what is false by showing them 
what is true. There is in every spirit of man a 
yearning for God, just as in the body there is an 



134 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

appetite for food. Men must eat something. If 
they do not have food which is wholesome, their 
hunger will drive them to that which does them 
harm. 

Now, the Bible recognizes the universal longing 
for God ; does not come to create it, but to bring 
it wholesome food; to guide it in safe paths. 
There is a faith in the wildest idolater which 
it gloriously confirms, which it holds to be above 
all price. It meets that dim, misguided faith, 
bending to it in wondrous love, waiting upon it 
with more than a mother's patience, speaking to it 
in words to which it cam listen, lifting it up, 
breathing life into it, leading it out into the true 
light, showing to it the true God for whom it was 
feeling in the dark, and teaching it to look on him 
and say, w Abba, Father." This is what the 
Bible does, all it does, to cure men of their doubts 
concerning God. It tells us that we already be- 
lieve in him, as we know that we do. It stoops 
to this blinded faith, and tenderly lifts it up out of 
darkness and sin. We are thankful for its 
gracious treatment of us. There is that in us 
which leaps forth with joy at its coming. It speaks 
the very thoughts concerning God which had all 
our lives lain within us, but for which we had 
found no voice. That voice it is. It is our John 
the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness of our 
own thoughts, which all that is good in us comes 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 135 

out to hear. As we read on, and enter into the 
meaning of what we read, our hearts say, u Why 
had no one ever thought of these things before ? " 

We have believed in this God from our birth, 
but could not speak our faith. No man has been 
able to speak it for us. The words of men have 
made us almost doubt that there is a God. But 
here is a book which, unlike all other books, 
speaks of God just as our hearts would speak if 
they had a voice. It also tells us many wondrous 
and glorious things concerning him which we could 
not find out, but which, now that we see them, we 
rejoice in with a joy unspeakable. If there were 
no external proofs, this internal witness would be 
enough for us. We read these glowing pages, 
and the God whom we have yearned for is no 
longer an unknown God. We begin to see him 
as he is. He draws our hungry spirits away from 
all false gods. He is revealed to us, and we feel 
all through our souls that the words which we are 
reading are his words. As no one can know what 
is in us save as we ourselves tell, so this book, 
which tells us what is in God, must be his own 
words. Who knows the things of a man save his 
own spirit? and so that which knows and tells the 
things of God, telling them in so wonderful a 
manner, can be none other than the spirit of 
God. 

Passing on, then, from the truth that God is, 



136 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

to these things of God which the Bible tells as 
only God could, we notice among them the father- 
hood of God, on which the Bible so insists. This 
truth is correlative to one which we considered 
in the last chapter. In what the Bible says of 
men we saw that they are the children of God ; 
and now, in what it says of God, we are made to 
see that he is the Father of men. In the gene- 
alogy of our Lord, which is given in the third of 
Luke, his parentage is traced to Enoch, ?? which 
was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, 
which was the son of God." But man became un- 
conscious of this divine sonship by falling into 
sin ; it lay dead within him in the midst of his 
trespasses ; and, with the sonship, the fatherhood 
also faded out of his sight. Man has become an 
orphan only by departing from God. The great 
Father still lives, nor does he forget or cease to 
love his prodigal child. It is our knowledge of 
God's fatherhood, not the fatherhood itself, which 
went away from the world w T hen man sinned. It 
only seemed to go because the sonship, the power 
of seeing it and rejoicing in it, went. The light 
seems to fade from the landscape as our vision 
grows dim, yet it may be as bright as ever. 
When we think the stars have faded out of the 
sky, that is not because they are no longer there, 
but because we have lost the power of seeing 
them. The fatherhood was ever true, as it now 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OE GOD. 137 

is, and ever will be, but the sonship proved false. 
That turned its back on God, — desired not the 
knowledge of his ways, lost his original power of 
seeing him. Yet man did not lose, he could not 
wholly lose, his instinctive feeling after God. He 
soon found, in the far country, that he needed a 
Father, and wondered whether or not he had a 
Father. 

We believe that God is this divine Father, dear 
friend, before we read the Bible. It is one of 
those necessary ideas which are a part of the 
original outfit of our minds. Our Bibles only 
wake it up within us as we read them. The 
fatherhood of God, in which we naturally believe, 
does not mean mere indulgence, an easy good 
nature, forgiveness without cause. One of the 
elements of a true fatherhood is justice, love of 
order, the equal and impartial treatment of those 
who hold the relation of children. We want to 
feel that there is, at the head of the universe, One 
who will care for all its interests, in whose hands it 
is forever safe. He must hate wrong just as 
thoroughly as he loves what is right ; otherwise he 
cannot be the Father for whom we are looking. 
We must know that he is this, that he cares for 
the whole, that he will let no great interest suffer ; 
then we can come with assurance to him when we 
are in trouble, when our hearts are pained, when 
the sense of guilt is strong within us. The Bible 



138 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

must show us such a God as this, or he is not the 
Father we want. 

And what does the Bible say to us about God as 
soon as we open it ? Are we not amazed to find 
how T exactly it answers to the ideas and longings 
of our hearts? Has any man ever given, could 
any man ever give, an account of God so respon- 
sive to the demand within us ? We read on and 
on, and are struck to see how his interest in us as 
our Maker and Kuler comes out. The more mas- 
culine traits of the fatherhood first show them- 
selves. We see that God is impartial, that he will 
put down wrong, that he reigns in justice and 
truth. Thus is the basis of a sound fatherhood 
laid in the earlier parts of the history. Yet from 
the beginning the love of God shines forth. The 
Bible has more to say of God's tenderness as we 
get farther on in it. The justice and sovereignty 
are not forgotten, they nowhere sink out of sight. 
Yet the gentleness and love come out more and 
more, the farther we get in the book, till we come 
to Jesus Christ, in whom the father dwelt, full of 
grace and truth. In a way that is most wonder- 
ful, mercy and truth meet together, righteousness 
and peace kiss each other. 

In due time there is a perfect divine sonship on 
earth in Jesus of Nazareth ; and he it is who teaches 
us that we should call God by the tender name of 
ff Father." If we tremble when we think of the 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD. 139 

wrongs and violences which fill the earth, the God 
whom the Bible reveals to us allays all our fears. 
Though our hearts condemn us for our faults, yet, 
in our own penitence, we have confidence towards 
God. He is not like an earthly father. He 
changes not. The sonship failed in us, but the 
fatherhood never fails ; it is without shadow of 
turning. Not only in its impartial justice, but in 
its forgiving tenderness, it is yesterday, to-day, 
and forever, the same. 

Such is a little of what the Bible tells us 
concerning God. Does it not answer to our 
natural ideas of him, and to all those wants which 
we expect him to supply? As the key fits the 
lock, as the child knows its father's voice, so this 
Bible, wondrously fitted to our case, saying what 
we expected God to say, just what we most 
yearned to hear from him, can be none other than 
God's message to men. If we are weak and fear- 
ful and unknowing, it tells us that he is infinitely 
strong and calm and wise. He forgives the 
guilty, he restrains the wayward, he chastens the 
imperfect. When we are in difficulty, he succors 
us ; he cheers us when we faint ; when we are in 
sorrow he brings comfort ; and when we are dying 
he says, " Behold, I live." 

I might weary you, did I go too far with this 
inquiry, showing you, all through the Bible, how 
the God whom the Bible reveals is just such an one 



140 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD, 

as we expect and need. It speaks as divinely of 
him as it does of man. His presence tills it as the 
water does the sea, as the sunlight does the sky. 
The book lies open before you like a boundless 
expanse of rosy bloom. You would require ages 
of time to wander through it and examine each 
particular flower. This is what all prophets, all 
singers, all apostles, all preachers, all writers upon 
the truths of the Bible, have been doing for 
thousands of years. They have not yet got to the 
end. They never will open all the seals. Only 
the Lamb in the midst of the throne can do that ; 
for in its breadth and length and depth and height, 
the love of God passeth knowledge. It is of God's 
love, infinitely tender and infinitely just, that the 
Bible tells us ; and in eternity, as in time, we 
shall sing, "The half was never told." But how 
that love pours itself out in the one sacred book ! 
As much of it as words will contain is there. It 
swells the sentences and phrases to bursting, as the 
breath of spring swells the buds throughout the 
forests. Even its narratives of earthly events, 
and its genealogies, and catalogues of forgotten 
names, drop with fatness, like the pastures of the 
wilderness. 

Whatever else you say of the Bible, you are 
obliged to confess that it is full of God. It does 
not let you go from his presence or escape from 
his spirit. It pours his blessed life around and 



WHAT THE BIBLE SATS OF GOD. 141 

through you if you have a willing soul, as the sun 
pours his splendor round the world. Read the 
Bible as you should, and you will find your soul 
swimming in God as the fishes swim in the sea ; his 
presence will waft you on as the air wafts the 
birds in their flight. This is Avhat makes the Bible 
so wonderful, — the book of books. God is in it, 
and fills it, so that the very style of its composi- 
tion, though largely the work of unlearned men, 
stands supreme and alone. In sublimity, in 
naturalness, in beauty and simplicity, in clearness 
and grandeur and force, and the absence of all pre- 
tence, it has never been approached, nor can it 
ever be. God is in it, and, therefore, all the 
glory and harmony and sweetness of the universe, 
yea, more than all, is gathered within its lids. 
You meet God at every turn and step of the 
wondrous pathway, nor do you ever weary of his 
presence ; the more you look, the more do you 
long to see. For though he is everywhere essen- 
tially the same God in his love and goodness and 
truth, yet he shows himself in ways which are ever 
new and fresh, which are divinely suited -to the 
exact case you are in. 

He joins himself to you in the very first verse 
of the book, and journeys on with you all the 
way, nor do you once miss him if your eyes are 
open while you walk. I bless God for giving us 
this book, — the book which is so full of him, which 



142 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

makes him its mighty theme, nor seems to care for 
aught else ! This is my inheritance, this is my 
light, this is my refreshment and rest ! What care 
I for other portions while this is mine ? I walk 
on through its heavenly paths, everywhere golden 
with God's presence, and I do not wonder that it 
has changed, and is still changing, the face of the 
world. It is all clear to me now ; no longer a hid- 
den mystery, but an open secret, that the Bible 
has turned so many islands and continents to 
Christ ; for I find that God is in it, and fills it, and 
walks with it through the world. He is there, — 
the God who, our yearning hearts tell us, must 
somewhere be revealed. It tells us, in a way 
which hushes the deep cry of the human spirit, of 
the fatherhood which is just, of the mercy which 
hates wrong, of the tenderness which is impartial, 
of the love which never fails. It tells us, as nature 
but merely hints, as no other book ever can tell 
us, of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; of the 
covenants, of redemption, of healing and cleans- 
ing ; of the victory over death, of the life beyond 
life, in which what is now dark shall be made 
plain. It tells us of ten thousand things which 
guide, comfort, and strengthen us, which we had 
all our lives been groping after in the dark ; which 
we felt must exist somewhere in some great 
Father, and which, being revealed to us by it, 
make us exclaim, "This is indeed that true God 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF GOD, 143 

and eternal life which should come into the 
world ! " 

Is it not a joy to know, dear friend, that there 
has been one instance of sonship in our world, 
though only one, which was a perfect response to 
the fatherhood of God? The sonship died in 
Adam, but it was made alive in Christ, and in him 
alone it has not failed. How this singles out 
Christ from all that have been born of women, and 
makes him the one Christ to us, as there is one 
sun in our heavens ! We cannot look on our own 
dishonored sonship, and come with confidence to 
the Father ; but we can look on his, and know that 
for his sake God will regard us as dear children. 
He is our elder brother ; he represents us in our 
relations to the Father ; he mediates for us with 
God, and with him God is ever well pleased. 

What love for us God showed by inspiring men 
to tell us these precious truths concerning him, 
which truths he had revealed to them ! God has 
all he desires in himself. It is his glory to be 
concealed. Why should he not love that solitude, 
that life within himself, which is the highest boon 
that we sometimes covet ? But he does not stay 
in his secret place ; he comes out of his covert, 
and shows himself unto us, not for his sake, but 
for ours. Shall he thus come to us, and we shrink 
from him? Shall he call, and we not answer, — 
speak, and we not hear? Shall his love bring him 



144 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

to us, and we lack the loving impulse which 
shall carry us to him. We know that we are his 
sinful children, as his book tells us we are. Our 
hearts leap for joy at the tidings of his perfect 
fatherhood, which that book brings us. Oh, that 
we might rise up and go to him, that he might 
say of each one of us, "This my son was dead, 
and is alive again ; was lost, but is found ! " 



CHAPTER X. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MOKAL ORDER. 

The Bible shows itself to be the work of God, 
not only in what it says of God and man, but in 
what it says of the moral order of the world. 
What I mean by the moral order of the world w r ill 
be clear to us if we look a little at the physical 
order of the world, and the laws on which that 
order depends. 

The most obvious instance of order or harmony 
in nature is that which depends on the law of 
gravitation, on the attraction which every particle 
of matter has for every other particle. There is 
unity and harmony throughout nature, from the 
circumference to the centre. All the matter in 
the universe, though scattered through infinite 
space, and infinitely various in forms and functions, 
is yet one harmonious system, owing to that force 
and law of gravity to which it is everywhere 
obedient. This wondrous force has ruled the ten 
thousand suns in immeasurable space, and has 
created their planetary systems. It keeps the 
countless worlds in their places, and rolls them on 
in their daily and yearly rounds. The tendency 
of every atom of matter towards every other atom 

145 



146 NOT OF 31 AN, BUT OF GOD. 

holds the solid earth together, and keeps the ocean 
from rising up into the air. It is the ballasting 
which keeps the ships in the embrace of the waves ; 
without it the fishes could not swim, nor the birds 
fly. The force of gravity holds all men and 
animals to the surface of the ground, it makes our 
homes and cities stand firm, it keeps our carriages 
and trains on the roadways which we make for them. 
But for gravitation and its laws, the streams would 
have no flow downward, the seed which quits the 
sower's hand would not drop into the soil, the 
ploughshare could not turn its furrow. The force 
of gravity draws the roots of the trees down into 
the ground, makes the trees stand upright, brings 
their ripened fruits or seeds into the earth to make 
other trees. Thus it is that we have, out of his 
one mighty force, the beauteous order of the physi- 
cal world, so essential to our physical being and 
well-being, and which so enchants our minds. 

Now we know that in the moral world, as in the 
natural, there is a single principle of order to 
which all our activities, and all the activities of 
other moral beings throughout the universe, should 
conform. When there is this conformity we shall 
have in its highest manifestation the moral order 
of the world. We call this principle of universal 
moral order by various names, such as righteous- 
ness, justice, benevolence, rectitude of conduct, 
the right good-will to men, disinterested love, and 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 147 

so on. This idea of a principle or law of moral 
order, which is binding upon all rational beings, is 
native to our minds. We do not first get it from 
our Bibles. All men have it, however sadly 
neglected and undeveloped, even where the words 
of revelation have not gone. Though we may do 
wrono; ourselves, we demand that others shall do 
right. Our own thoughts condemn us when we 
swerve from this principle of moral rectitude. 
The wicked know that they ought to be righteous, 
the selfish that they should do as they would be 
done by, those who bite and devour one another 
that they should love their neighbor as themselves. 
If any man says he does not know this, it is 
because he does not know himself. The idea is in 
him, nor can it ever be wholly destroyed. He 
may have perverted it ; all men have, more or less. 
He may have let the faculty for this knowledge 
rust in him unused. A sensual and brutal life 
may have put it to sleep, but it is there. It comes 
forth into his consciousness, upbraids him for his 
evil ways, and still points him to the faith he 
should w^alk in, as often as he reflects. 

Now the question is, Does the Bible honor, re- 
affirm, clear up, and put in a stronger light than 
any other book ever has, this inherent conviction 
of the human mind ? If a man should undertake 
to teach us about nature, and should deny the law 
of gravitation which Newton discovered, we could 






148 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 



b 



give him no heed, but should at once turn him a 
deaf ear. On the other hand, if he recognized the 
law, if he set forth its nature and workings as 
neither Newton nor any one else ever has, showing 
an entire and wonderful mastery of the whole sub- 
ject, then we should listen to him ; and if he claimed 
to be specially commissioned to expound nature to 
us, we should be disposed to admit his claim. It is 
on such a ground, dear friend, that w T e must 
receive the Bible as God's book, when it speaks to 
us of the moral order of the world. 

The Bible nowhere denies the law of rectitude 
written on our hearts. It affirms that law all 
through its pages ; emphasizes it, expounds it, 
clears it up, and applies it as no other book has, 
as all other books together never have. Many 
ethical systems have been thought out by man, — 
those of Socrates, Confucius, Sakya-muni, Aris- 
totle, Seneca. But the ethics of the Bible puts 
out all their light, as the noontide sun does that of 
our candles. Even those human systems which 
have been written since the Bible came, and which 
are largely drawn from it, nevertheless utterly fail 
to reach its high plane. It expounds our duties to 
one another with a plainness, a thoroughness, and a 
self-evidencing power w T hich we nowhere else find. 
It reveals us to ourselves in our divine and 
eternal relations, as other books do not even 
pretend to do. The horizon of conscience around 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL OBDEB. 149 

us is widened while it speaks, and we see the 
sweep and glory of the law of righteousness in a 
wholly new and heavenly light. 

How wonderfully it teaches the one great law 
of all moral order ! — more by example than by ab- 
stract precept, especially in the beginning. God 
himself first appears as the perfect embodiment of 
the principle. He calls and sets apart men, from 
Abraham onward, whose office it is to uphold this 
law. So far as they are true to their office we 
see order coming out of confusion, and God steps 
forth to vindicate moral order when it is broken. 
The first kingdom which he sets up is a theocracy ; 
for only as he, who is love, rules in the earth, 
does social chaos end and the true order of society 
begin. That the Judge of all the earth would do 
right was a truth which the most untutored con- 
science could accept. Yet how wisely, in a slow 
and progressive way, as men could bear it, the 
law of righteousness is unfolded in the Bible ! It 
does not at once bind on men's shoulders a burden 
too heavy to be borne. It was but gradually that 
men could be lifted out of the wickedness in which 
they were sunk. 

God allowed some things to them on account of 
the hardness of their hearts. The morality of the 
Old Testament was perfect in principle, but could 
come out only imperfectly in the lives of those 
primitive men. With this human imperfection 



150 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

God had patience, as he still is patient toward 
human faults. In one alone, Jesus Christ his 
own Son, was the principle of moral order acted 
out perfectly in our world. He did the Father's 
will. He was love, as the Father is love. He 
showed us in his life and death what is that law 
which, when all men obey it, will make the moral 
and social world more gloriously in harmony than 
the world of matter. 

But before that which was perfect came, all 
through the times of the imperfect, the law of 
righteousness w T as made manifest. Men and 
nations were destroyed for breaking this law, and 
the people of God prospered only as they obeyed 
it. The word " righteousness," or its equivalents, 
resounds all through the writings of Moses, of 
David and Solomon, of the later prophets. It 
rises more and more into view, as in the geologi- 
cal periods the mountains rose out of the sea ; as 
we all pass from infancy to manhood by a process 
of gradual unfolding ; as in the fields where we have 
sown our grain there is first the blade, then the 
ear, after that the full corn in the ear. The per- 
fect moral order which came forth in Jesus Christ, 
and which is one day to make the lives of all men 
a psalm of praise in God's ear, was that which 
moved him to make the earth and put man upon 
it ; was that which he watched all through the un- 
folding of his purpose ; is that which shines forth 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 151 

more and more clearly upon us as we turn the 
pages of the Bible. Whether we call it righteous- 
ness, or benevolence, or love, the law of it is written 
on our hearts ; and the Bible gives it back to us 
in such clear and uniform and authoritative tones as 
belong to none but God, 

This law of moral order is common to God and 
all his children. Let us not fear to think of God 
as himself setting us an example of obedience. He 
does obey this sacred, all-encompassing law of 
which I have spoken ; and it is by thus obeying that 
he reigns supreme. God would not be God if he 
should cease to be love. Our own hearts tell us 
this, and the Bible confirms what they say. God 
will never disobey the law which is to bring har- 
mony and peace to the universe at last. He is 
supreme. He has in himself all blessedness and 
power. Hence it is not possible that he should 
ever be tempted to do wrong. Our temptations 
arise out of the fact that we are finite ; that we are 
not wholly blessed ; that we long for things which 
are not as yet ours. If we were perfectly satisfied 
with what is innocently ours, we could not be 
tempted to break the law of love. Therefore, God 
cannot be tempted to break it. If he should, his 
sense of guilt would be to ours as the ocean to the 
drop. What is the power of conscience in us to 
what it is in him ? He tells us that he hates in- 
iquity : what, then, if he should see iniquity in 



152 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

himself? The wrong doing of poor, feeble mor- 
tals has spread confusion through our world : 
what, then, would happen if the infinite God 
should do wrong? If he were wrong, all our 
righteousness could amount to nothing ; but he is 
right, and, therefore, the universe is safe, and 
shall at last sing its glad psalm of peace, despite 
all the wickedness which is now in it. Such is 
the testimony of our deepest thought, and to it 
the Bible is one glorious divine response. 

God obeys the law which is yet to harmonize 
the moral world, and for this cause he is infinitely 
blessed. Not because he is great, not because he 
made and rules all things, not because he is high 
and lifted up and worshipped by both angels and 
men ; but because he is good, because he is love, 
because he watches over all beings and events with 
a fatherly tenderness, and will at length bring 
them to the highest possible beauty and glory, is 
he forevermore filled with a boundless and radiant 
joy. And what his living for the harmony of the 
moral universe does for him, such in proper meas- 
ure may our respect to the law of righteousness 
do for us. It is a law common to us and him, and 
it works out everywhere the same results. They 
can differ only in degree, never in kind. If we 
are righteous, we shall eat the fruits of righteous- 
ness ; if we sow to the spirit, we shall of the spirit 
reap life everlasting ; if we are helping to make 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MOBAL OBBEB. 153 

the new heavens and earth, we shall ourselves be 
renewed with them. God, who is love, gave his 
joy to Christ, and Christ gives his joy to as many 
as live his life of meekness and self-sacrifice. 
There is a kind of superficial happiness which de- 
pends on earthly position, — how you are clothed 
and fed, what your fellow-men think of you, or the 
power you are able to wield over them. But real 
blessedness depends on none of these things. So 
your heart teaches you, and to this teaching the 
Bible gives more than a human, a truly divine, 
response. It clearly and mightily says, as your 
own soul says feebly, that you are not blessed as 
you are rich, as you are powerful, as you are 
honored of men, as you have all earthly pleasures 
and delights, but as you love the Lord your God 
with all your heart, and your neighbor as your- 
self. Love, true love, such love as Christ had 
and proclaimed, not only casts out fear, but every- 
thing else which has torment ; it makes you to be 
in league with the divine order of the world ; all 
things are yours, and you are swept on with them, 
God himself being over all and in all, to that 
bright consummation which God has purposed. 
The more you study the laws of your own con- 
science, the more does some such glorious dream 
as this open before you in the far-coming vistas ; 
and the Bible is that divine word which comes to 
you to interpret your dream. 



154 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

But I have hinted at the doom of those who 
break this law, at what God would suffer if he 
could possibly cease to regard it. We know that 
men are, in their character and life, unlike God, 
and one of the first things which the Bible teaches 
us is that they have thus fallen away. We cannot 
clearly account for this apostasy, nor does the 
Bible attempt to solve for us the dark problem of 
evil. Our great need is to be raised out of the pit 
of sin ; and to that gracious work the Bible applies 
itself. Yet it throws light, such as man could not, 
into the gulf out of which it would lift us. It 
brings in a malign spiritual power. This power it 
gives personality to in the form of the serpent, 
and shows it to us in Eden. Man would not have 
fallen but for two things : a desire within him for 
what God had forbidden, and the tempter appeal- 
ing to that desire. Our finiteness, our yearning for 
what we have not, so strikingly pictured to us by 
the tree in the midst of the garden, lays us open 
to temptation. That is as far as human thought 
has ever gone in regard to the origin of sin ; and 
for that we are indebted to the Bible, which threw 
this utmost possible light on the dark question ages 
before human philosophy was born. The doctrine 
of Satan, prince of the power of the air, of which 
the Bible is so full, has been objected to by super- 
ficial thinkers, but never by those who think pro- 
foundly on the origin of evil. It is a great light 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 155 

shed on the facts of human wickedness, it joins 
with the tree in the midst of the garden in 
proclaiming that the Bible is God's book. 

And as what the Bible says of the origin of sin 
shows it to be divine, so what it says of its 
consequences, of punishment, of retribution, 
proves the same. The idea of retribution was in 
the world before the Bible came. All men had it ; 
it is native to the human mind, and was waked up 
by the presence of sin. You can find no race, no 
tribe ; no man, woman, or child in- which this idea 
has not shown itself in some form. The imao-erv 
of outer darkness, of unquenchable fire, of the 
worm that never dies, was in the world 
when the Bible began to be written. It 
makes use of this material imagery, as on all 
themes it speaks the common language of men. 
But how it has cleared up the doctrine which it 
found ! — not denying it, everywhere confirming it, 
yet gradually taking away from it all that was 
gross and brutal, tracing it to the laws of con- 
science, making it that remorse, that fiery and 
eternal self-condemnation, that abhorrence felt by 
God and all righteous beings, which we know 
from experience that the commission of crime and 
sin must ever bring. The retribution into which 
we are hurried by our sins is due to the laws 
which govern our moral nature ; God does not ar- 
bitrarily inflict it upon us. 



156 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

What, then, should we say of a book which did 
not recognize those laws ? What must we say of 
any or all books which deny retribution, or which 
try to show that it is not in the Bible? Its 
absence from the Bible would go to show that the 
book is not divine, that it is a merely human and 
sophistical book. When God speaks, he says, as 
our moral nature says : " In the day thou eatest 
thereof thou shalt surely die." We know who it 
was that said : " Thou shalt not surely die." Oh, 
how hard it must have been for God to warn and 
threaten his sinning children as he does all through 
the Bible ! You know from what earthly parents 
often suffer that it must have grieved him to the 
heart. But what are our pity and tenderness to 
his? He is infinite in all his attributes, in his emo- 
tions, in his feelings toward sinful men. His com- 
passions are unspeakable. Yet the Bible, claiming 
to speak for him, probes the human conscience as no 
other books do. Is any but God capable of such 
faithfulness ? Would any other dare so to arraign 
mankind? or could even he doit, except to make 
an entrance into our hearts for some saving and 
cleansing mercy which he brings? He dares to 
gather up those elements of remorse which are in 
us all, and to give them back to us in tones fitted 
to make us cry out for deliverance. Ah 5 dear 
friend, if you would but hear those tones ! The 
sweet tenderness and compassion which breathe 
through them are infinite. 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 157 

Read the rebukes of our blessed Lord to the 
Pharisees, and to his own faithless disciples. 
Nowhere else can you find any denunciations so 
terrible. Yet could we have been there, could we 
have heard him speak, and looked on his sorrowful 
face, we can but think that his heavenly accents 
would have melted our hearts, and that we should 
have wept, as he often wept, over sinning men. 
But God cannot be anything less than God. He 
is faithful and true, infinitely honest in his dealing 
with us. The Bible shows that it is his word to 
us, in what it says of the consequences of our sins. 
That law of righteousness on which the moral 
order of the world depends is eternal. It is to the 
relations of all rational beings what the law of 
gravity is to the world of matter. God obeys it, 
and is supremely blessed. He made his universe 
for it, and it shall bring all who obey it into 
perfect harmony at last. This much our own 
consciousness tells us ; and if we have broken that 
holy law, we carry within us the witness that we 
cannot escape its doom. With that inward witness 
the Bible agrees, agrees with it as no other book 
ever has. We read it, and we say, "How 
thoroughly the author of this book knows what is 
in men ! Our ideas of moral order, and of the 
blessedness or retribution which that order deals 
out, are here all confirmed, cleared up, put in such 
a light as we can nowhere else find. He who has 



158 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

sent us this book must be one who knows us 
altogether, who searches our hearts, who tries our 
reins, who weighs our spirits in a balance." 

None but the God who made man could have 
this profound knowledge of man's spiritual na- 
ture. God alone could thus beset us behind 
and before, and lay his hand upon us ; could 
reveal to us those deep workings of our minds 
which we lack words to speak. We are fear- 
fully and wonderfully made, and that our soul 
knoweth right well. Yet here is one who knows 
us better than we know ourselves. Our most 
secret faults are committed in the light of his 
countenance. Our dreamy and half-formed desires 
he gives back to us in such a way that we are 
thereby first revealed to ourselves. We find that 
there is not a thought in our heart, or a word in 
our tongue, but lo ! he knows it altogether. Can 
this be a man who is speaking to us out of this 
book ? Never ! Impossible ! So meagre a cause 
could never produce so wondrous an effect. God 
is in this book. It makes the place where it is 
none other than the house of God, and the gate of 
heaven. 

" There are, in this unreverential age, 

Who, dazed by vain philosophy, have classed 
The revelations of the sacred page 
Amongst the bursten bubbles of the past. 
Be ours the wisdom still to hold them fast; 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF MORAL ORDER. 159 

Not as despising aught that sense can teach, 
Or any light that closer search may cast 

On this world's mysteries, or thought can reach 
From inmost corners of its right domain ; 

But firmly fixed in this: that after each 
Has reaped its ripest knowledge, there remain 

Truths that transcend or human thought or speech, 
Or nature's oracle. These to despise, 
When God unveils them, let us think unwise." 



CHAPTER XI. 

WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 

I have, in the last three chapters, spoken a 
little of certain truths and facts which we partially 
know before the Bible comes to us ; which truths 
and facts the Bible not only confirms, but thor- 
oughly reveals and clears up in a way possible to 
none but God. 

Concerning man, we know that he has high 
spiritual capacities, and the Bible tells us that he 
is the child of God ; we know that he thinks him- 
self immortal, and this thought the Bible brings 
out into the light ; we know that he is out of 
harmony with himself and the true order of things, 
and the Bible tells us that he has fallen away from 
his original fellowship with God. Concerning 
God, we know that he exists, and the Bible every- 
where takes his existence for granted ; we know 
that he must have a father's feelings towards us, 
and the Bible gives to this knowledge a new glory 
and depth ; our idea of him makes us feel that he 
must be infinitely just and impartial, and the Bible 
everywhere assures us that he will do right. Con- 
cerning the moral order of the world, we know 

160 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 161 

that there is a law of righteousness which all 
rational beings should obey, and the Bible through- 
out its pages solemnly proclaims the sacredness 
of this law ; we know that all who keep this law 
are blessed, and this knowledge the Bible wonder- 
fully clears up ; we know that whoever breaks 
this law of righteousness or love brings on himself 
the condemnation of all enlightened consciences, 
and the Bible paints to us in flaming colors the 
a wf ulness of this doom. 

But 1 now bring you, dear friend, to that in the 
Bible which our natural reason does not reveal to 
us, — to that which the angel meant when he said 
to our Lord's mother, " Thou shalt call his name 
Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." 
This is the Holy of Holies in God's precious book. 
We should approach it with awe, yet with a 
tremulous joy. There is not, in this volume, 
space for an adequate treatment of the theme ; 
or if there were the space and the time, no man 
can speak of it as it deserves. Redeeming love is 
the wonder of wonders, as it is the truth of truths. 
The greatest minds have been trying to expound 
it ever since God first revealed it to man, but it 
is yet the unexplained mystery. Children know 
as much of it as the wise and prudent. Angels 
try to look into it, but it is sealed to their gaze. 
We may know its power in our experience, but 
all our attempts to draw it out into dogmas or 



162 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

formulas fall short. We may lift the curtain, we 
may enter in, we may look on the mystery till we 
feel the load of guilt falling away from our hearts ; 
but when asked to tell what it is, we can only say, 
"It is the blood of Calvary, it is the cross of 
Jesus Christ." 

This was an absolutely new truth in the world 
when God first spoke it to men. Turn off on 
either hand from the pathway of divine revelations, 
and search where you will among secular histories, 
and you nowhere come upon the clear announce- 
ment of salvation from sin. That voice first began 
to be heard in Eden as soon as the forbidden fruit 
was eaten, and it culminated in the glad cry at 
Bethlehem, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of 
great joy, which shall be to all people." The 
greatest sages of antiquity, to whom God had not 
spoken, were unable to believe in the forgiveness 
of sin. Socrates and Plato, who came as near the 
truth as any, only hoped that in some way God 
might be able to forgive sin, but they did not see 
how. They believed in the punishment of sin 
with all their heart ; but how the sinner could be 
saved from punishment was a question before 
which they stood dumb. We cannot doubt that 
they, and perhaps millions of others who did not 
hear of a Saviour from sin while in the flesh, yet 
had such contrition and such view r s of the guilt of 
sin, that they would have at once laid hold of the 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 163 

cross, had it been shown them ; nor can we doubt 
that they now rejoice in it in the world where all 
is revealed. Yes, dear friend, men have always 
been able to discover that they were sinners, and 
that the laws of conscience doomed them to suffer 
for their sin. But how to escape this doom when 
it had been once incurred was a dark riddle which 
they could not solve, from the bare sight of which 
they shrank appalled. As long ago as the time 
of Job the cry broke forth out of guilty hearts, 
" Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean ? 
how shall man be just with God?" 

This question, which presses upon all men, and 
which no man has ever answered, not only has so 
clear an answer in the Bible as to prove that the 
Bible is God's book, but the answer itself, though 
the only one possible, is such that our poor, blind 
hearts are sometimes slow to accept it. The 
mighty truth of atonement, of reconciliation to 
God, of propitiation for sin through the blood of 
Jesus Christ, has been set at naught and ridiculed. 
But it is when men have not seen their sin, when 
they have forgotten the laws of conscience and 
the moral order of the world, that they have 
mocked. When they have known themselves, 
and that eternal order with which their lives 
are at war, they have not said that the vicarious 
sacrifice is a relic of barbarism, or that the doctrine 
of atonement makes God a merciless tyrant, or 



164 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

that the cross is " the central gallows of the uni- 
verse." Far from that ! Feeling their guilt, and 
knowing that in the nature of things punishment 
must forever follow guilt, they wonder and adore, 
and believe and love, when they see the blood 
which cleanses from all sin, when they behold the 
Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the 
world. 

This truth of a crucified Eedeemer, in whose 
death we die unto sin, and in whose life we are 
made alive unto God, is that which gives to the 
Bible its unique and unspeakable value for us. 
Take the sun out of the heavens, but do not take 
this out of the holy message which God has sent 
us. This is the shrine for which the temple was 
built ; and what is the temple without the shrine ? 
That temple, the revelation which God has given, 
stands before us beautiful and vast. Its massive 
walls and soaring pinnacles draw us to it from afar. 
On all sides of it doors stand open, through which 
the solemn light and the song flow forth over us. 
Enter by what door of inquiry we will, all the 
aisles lead inward and inward, till we stand under 
the glory of the high and surrounding dome. 
There it is that we see the cross which gives a 
divine meaning to the whole building, — the cross 
in which St. Paul gloried, refusing to glory in 
aught else ; the cross around whose head sublime 
is gathered all the light of sacred story ; the 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 165 

cross which towers above the wrecks of mighty 
civilizations ; the cross which is everywhere 
cherished as the symbol of what is holiest and 
sweetest in the world. Let no scoffing criticism 
spit out its venom against this sacred and blessed 
thing. Take away the Book when you have taken 
this away out of the Book. What is it to us but 
an unspeakable torment to know that God is holy 
and made the universe for holiness, while we find 
no salvation from the sin under which we are fallen ? 
Conscience and reason and nature tell us all that is 
dark or horrible in our case. If this Book only re- 
peats their words, if it does not bring us any 
tidings of a rescue from our doom, take it away. 
We want no more sense of guilt, we want forgive- 
ness. We want no more darkness, we want light. 
We want no more of the wrath of God, we want 
peace with God. Tear down the temple, let not 
one stone of it remain upon another, if the cross 
which we need to find at its centre be taken away. 
This is what our hearts say, and this is what they 
do who take from the Bible the cross of Christ. 
That gone, the whole structure falls to pieces. It 
has no coherence or meaning left. Those who do 
not find an atonement, salvation from sin, peace 
with God through Jesus Christ, in the Bible, soon 
find themselves without any Bible at all. Having 
spoiled the kernel, they throw away the husk. 
You send for your physician not merely to learn 



166 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

that you are sick, — you know that already, — but 
that you may be healed. Suppose he comes and 
tells you what you knew before, gives you a clearer 
knowledge than you had of your exact condition, 
and then goes away. He does not tell you what 
to do, does not prescribe any remedies. How 
long would you suffer yourself to be thus mocked ? 
He is no physician to you who only tells you that 
you are sick, and does not tell you how to get 
well. You know that you are hurt ; ff Is there no 
balm in Gilead ? May not my hurt be healed ? " is 
your anxious cry. " Yes, there is balm : you may 
be healed," says the great Physician. If all the 
wise men who have ever lived should come to us, 
and try to tell us how we may be in harmony with 
the moral order of the world, they could not do it. 
They would be forced to go away and leave us no 
medicine. They would have either to depart in 
silence, or say : " You must die ; we can do nothing 
for you." But the Bible comes, and it says 
nothing of this sort. They are the mighty words 
of comfort and hope which it speaks to us. It 
shows us the malignity of our disease as nothing 
else could, but it does not then say that we must 
die; no, dear friend, it says live: "Live, for I 
have found a ransom." 

" I have found a ransom," is the glad voice 
which rolls through the sky from the Alpha to the 
Omega of this message. That is the everlasting 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 167 

gospel which the angel, flying in the midst of 
heaven, has to preach unto men. It is a cloud- 
scattering, a light-giving, a heart-uplifting voice 
wherever it is heard. No man, who has looked 
into his own soul and the true nature of things, 
ever refused to hear that voice. The ef atonement," 
" cross," " vicarious sacrifice," at which men have 
stumbled, is some intellectual theory of the great 
ransom which men have thought out. When the 
ransom itself, in all its divine beauty and wonder- 
fulness, bursts on our sight we do not reject it ; we 
lay hold of it, we clasp it with frantic joy to our 
hearts. Acute thinkers have tried to formulate 
the truth, and other acute thinkers have rebelled 
against the formulas, and in the heat of debate 
some have been carried on until they could see in 
the precious truth itself no beauty. Oh, how 
differently it looked to them, how full of a glo- 
rious and divine power to comfort and heal them, 
when it came to them in the simplicity and fresh- 
ness of the Bible ! It was to them as the rose and 
the lily, as the dew that descended on Hermon and 
on Mount Zion. There is nothing which men are 
naturally quicker to believe in than the atoning 
work of Christ. When they first hear it from the 
lips of Christian missionaries, it is altogether new 
and mysterious to them, yet they listen to it, to 
the story of the cross, with an eager joy. " Where 
did you find out this ? " they ask. They naturally 



168 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

feel that no man could have taught it. f We 
found it in this volume, which is God's book," is 
the only answer that can meet their earnest 
questioning. If we must have human theories of 
this work of salvation from sin, let them stay 
where they may perhaps do some good, — round 
about the sacred truth which error is assailing. 
But to a world lying in wickedness, to human 
hearts conscious of their guilt, carry the story of 
the cross in the simple words in which the apostles 
tell it, and no one can withstand its pow T er. It is just 
that which every soul that knows itself is yearning 
for. It is manna to the hungry, and to the weary it 
is rest. It is the old story which our blessed Lord 
himself so often told to wondering listeners ; which 
bowed the hearts of the multitude on the day of 
Pentecost ; which has gone through the world 
making the solitary place glad, and causing the 
desert to blossom as the rose. 

We know, dear friend, that we have broken the 
law of righteousness, on which the moral order of 
the world depends. We are suffering the penalties 
of that broken law in our own consciences, and we 
see not how we can ever cease thus to suffer. 
That which puts an end to remorse must put an 
end to the remembrance of sin. Who can save us 
from the consequences of what we have done? 
Who can so completely draw us into a new life in 
him as to make us forget how we have lived in the 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 169 

past? No man has yet been found who was able 
to answer these questions. It can be none other 
than God's book in which w r e read how sinful men 
may be forgiven, saved, cleansed, restored to the 
divine order which now wars against them. One 
who is without sin, who is the Son of God and in 
perfect accord with him, is born into our sinful hu- 
manity. He belongs to no race, no family, no 
age. He is the elder brother of you, of me, of 
every soul that has been, or that shall be, born into 
the world. He is the Son of man at the same 
time that he is the Son of God. He comes to us 
and beseeches us to let him act in our behalf. " I 
will be your representative ; I will take your 
place and act for you," he says, w w r ith respect to 
that moral order which you have violated." Yes, 
dear friend, Jesus Christ stands between us and 
our fears ; he meets the retribution which is 
marching down against us, and all its force is 
absorbed in him, while ^ye make him our substitute 
by our own act of faith in his name. He walks 
with us in the flames, and we are not scorched. 
He stands between us and righteousness ; between 
us and judgment ; between us and death. The 
fierce wrath and fury of all these rush against 
him, but they can go no farther. They are so ab- 
sorbed, satisfied, and done away in him that they 
cannot get to us. K Look," says our Bible ; " see 
the stormy surges beating against this rock only to 



170 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

be conquered. How they are hurled back from it ! 
They lie stunned and ashamed at its base. They 
cannot shake it or move it out of its place, for 
it is the Rock of Ages, and in it there is a hiding- 
place for every soul that has sinned." The wrath 
of that moral order which is coming out against us 
fully exhausts itself, comes to an end, is as though 
it had never been, in Him who humbled himself to 
the death of the cross. We are by our faith 
crucified with him, and with him we through that 
same faith live and reign. For we are in him, and 
he is in us ; and the law of righteousness being 
forever fulfilled in him, there is no more condem- 
nation, — no more guilty conscience to them that 
are in Christ Jesus, but peace with ourselves and 
with God. The enmity is slain by the cross. We 
see that hovering along the front of the black 
armies of retribution. Those armies, so eager to 
overwhelm us, are themselves overwhelmed, when 
they come up to that sacred symbol. They sink 
down out of sight, and we see them no more. So 
long as the cross does not forsake us, we are safe 
even against our own sins. This is what we read 
in our Bibles about escaping the dread conse- 
quences of sin. No man ever told us any such 
thing. 

Men cannot intellectually grasp the truth of 
salvation by the cross. They fret at it in their 
cold, intellectual moods, and reject it, or try to 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 171 

explain it away. But when conscience is lashing 
them with her fiery scourge they flee unto it. 
They do not ask to understand it. They know 
that it is God's gift, and they hide themselves 
under its shadow, praising and blessing his name 
that it is possible for him in his own way to save 
the soul which has sinned. We look all through 
the Bible, we are convinced by the many proofs 
that God gave it to us, but we keep asking, "Why 
did he give it? What is there in it worthy of his 
mighty interposition ? " At length we come upon 
the story of redemption. Here is the thing which 
we most sorely need. In many and wonderful 
ways the Bible tells us, over and over again, how 
sin and its consequences may be destroyed. This 
becomes the high and hol^and living God. This 
makes it wise and right in him to give us the book 
we have. This completes the circle of evidences ; 
this seals the testimony that the Bible is God's 
message to his sinning children, which he has sent 
to show them how they may be restored to har- 
mony with him, and with the moral order he has 
established. 

Christ can thus undertake for us, since the 
Bible shows him to be just such a Saviour as the 
exigency calls for. He is equal to the work of 
saving a lost race ; for he is in perfect sympathy 
with God and the eternal laws of righteousness. 
He made all things, and he upholds them by the 



172 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

word of his power. Who more than he is pledged 
to the highest good of the universe, is resolved 
that his universe shall forever receive no harm? 
If he were but a man or an archangel, we might 
fear to have such vast interests confided to him. 
But he is " God manifest in the flesh," and there- 
fore we may trust him to the uttermost. 

The emergency is a great one ; and at this point, 
as at all others, the Bible meets our inquiries in a 
way which is wholly wonderful and divine. Not 
only has Christ, as it teaches, suffered the ven- 
geance of the broken law in his own person, not 
only is he one in whose keeping the universe can 
never receive any harm, but he can restore those 
who have sinned to himself, to the Father, to the 
moral order of the world. This he does through 
their faith in him. The faith which we are to 
have joins us to him as the branch is joined to the 
vine, as the members are in the body. We lack 
spiritual life, in which alone there is power to live 
as God lives. This want of spiritual life in us 
Christ supplies by our union to him. The life of 
the vine goes out into the branches. Being 
grafted into the good olive-tree we partake of its 
fatness. Christ does not stop with taking our sins 
upon himself, he subdues within us the proclivity 
to sin. He washes us, he cleanses us, he renews 
us, he makes us like himself by the presence of his 
spirit within us. This is so true that St. Paul's 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 173 

inference is, w If we have not his spirit we are 
none of his." The tree will be known by its 
fruits. It is only those who accept him as their 
Saviour whose sins he atones for. All who truly 
do this are so joined to him as to be one spirit 
with him ; the divine life in him enters into them, 
and that life bears everywhere the same fruits, — 
not one thing in him and something else in his 
followers, but in them as in him : love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, truth. These 
are the fruits of the spirit ; and where these are in 
us and abound they bring us into harmony with 
God and with the eternal order of things. They 
restore us to the paths of righteousness, however 
we may have sinned in the past. They make 
our lives a part of the universal anthem of love 
in which all discordant notes shall one day be 
drowned. 

Such is the salvation, told in these few and 
inadequate words, which the Bible reveals. But 
when we know how adequate to our case the 
salvation itself is, what more need of witness is 
there that it comes from God ? The Bible would 
not be God's book to us if this were not in it ; 
and if this were its only witness it would be 
enough. Seeing the rosy dawn which rises upon 
us after our long night, we cannot doubt that it 
comes from the sun. Stooping down and drinking 
of the river of water of life, we cannot doubt that 



174 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

it flows out from under the throne of God and the 
Lamb. These words are too searching, too sweet 
and comforting, too uplifting, too saving and 
refreshing to be spoken by any but the Father 
of infinite love, who knows us altogether. 

Dear friend, are you sailing upon a dark and 
troubled sea of fears, of doubts, of baffled en- 
deavors to find the right path? Oh, look unto 
this great light, which is the true light of the world ! 
Let it not be in vain that the Father of mercies 
has had compassion on you. Sail into the light 
until the light shall enter into you and dwell there. 
If Christ had not come and spoken unto you, you 
had not sinned ; but now there is no cloak for 
your sin. "If the word spoken by angels was 
steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience 
received a just recompense of reward, how shall 
we escape if we neglect so great salvation, which 
at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and 
was confirmed unto us by them that heard him ? " 
Go to the lowly stone, in the shadow of Cambridge 
University, which covers the mortal remains of 
Henry Kirke White. Kneel beside that stone, 
and while rubbing the mould from its lettering, 
and thinking on his marvellous career, make his 
tribute to the Star which stood over Bethlehem 
yours : — 

" When marshalled on the nightly plain, 
The glittering host bestud the sky, 



WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS OF REDEMPTION. 175 

One star alone, of all the train, 
Can fix the sinner's wandering eye. 

Hark ! hark ! to God the chorus breaks, 
From every host, from every gem ; 

But one alone the Saviour speaks, — 
It is the Star of Bethlehem. 

" Once on the raging seas I rode, 

The storm was loud, the night was dark, 
The ocean yawned, and fiercely blowed 

The wind that tossed my foundering bark. 
Deep horror then my vitals froze ; 

Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem ; 
When suddenly a star arose, — 

It was the Star of Bethlehem. 

" It was my guide, my light, my all ; 

It bade my dark foreboding cease, 
And through the storm and danger's tbrall 

It led me to the port of peace. 
Now safely moored, my perils o'er, 

I'll sing, first in night's diadem, 
Forever and f orevermore, 

The Star, the Star of Bethlehem." 



CHAPTEE XII. 

WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 

You will naturally expect me, in this closing 
chapter, to say something of that disbelief of the 
Bible which often breaks forth in the world and 
abounds. What is the origin of that disbelief, and 
how may it be prevented or cured ? The argu- 
ments which prove that the Bible is God's book 
are so many and so accessible that we wonder why 
there should be any skeptics. It relieves the 
question somewhat to know that there is no truth 
which somebody has not doubted, still we ask how 
it can be accounted for. We give a reason for the 
faith in us ; what cause do we assign for the dis- 
belief or the unbelief in others ? 

This unbelief is not always assignable to the 
same cause, as we trace it. There are idiosyn- 
crasies in men ; they look at the Bible from dif- 
ferent points of view ; something peculiar in the 
training or surroundings or experience of the 
doubter has led him into his doubt. To take up 
all these cases and account for them, one by one, 
would be an endless task. I can give only certain 
quite general causes, which, I think, can be shown 
to be in some way at the bottom of nearly all 
176 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. Ill 

doubt as to the divine origin and binding author- 
ity of the Bible. 

It seems to me that the most general cause of 
unbelief is a worldly spirit. Men are not deeply 
and sincerely interested in divine things. They 
may be interested in them as theories, as curious 
and subtle speculations, but they are not inter- 
ested in them as facts. Those eternal things which 
relate to the soul are to them remote, vague, un- 
real. Temporal things are right about them, and 
pressing upon them, and they have fallen into the 
habit of giving these almost their undivided 
thoughts. 

Now you know that what we give our undivided 
attention to tends to educate us into sympathy 
with itself. If there be in us powers which have 
no affinity for it, these it leaves unnourished till 
they are dwarfed into useless rudimentary append- 
ages ; but such powers in us as have an affinity 
for it, it develops till they become overshadow- 
ing, and absorb the whole strength and vitality of 
our nature. 

There are two doors in each one of us, — a door 
by which we may go out into eternity and its great 
truths, and a door by which we may enter into the 
near and palpable interests of the worldly life. 
This latter door is always wide open, and the 
other is too apt to be altogether closed up. God 
is a spirit, and must be worshipped in spirit. The 



178 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

book he has given us speaks of spiritual things, 
nor can we receive it save in the exercise of our 
spiritual faculties. What wonder, then, if we doubt 
it, if we even reject it, when the spirit in us has 
become dormant, inactive, through our devotion 
to the world? How can we believe in that to 
which we have become dead ? The chief of the 
tropical island doubted that there was such a thing 
as ice, — water become solid, — for he had never 
seen anything of the sort. However much we 
may have heard of a remote city or country, until 
our own eyes have seen it, we are not as sure of 
its existence as we should like to be. 

But what if we are without eyes ? without any 
of those perceptions by which we may verify facts 
reported to us? It is not at all wonderful, if, in 
such a case, we refuse to believe ; and such is the 
case, in one form or another, of those in whom the 
claim of the Bible to be God's book aw r akens 
doubt. Christ said of those who would not be- 
lieve in his divine mission, c? This people's heart is 
waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, 
and their eyes they have closed." Such is the 
sad calamity which has overtaken those who doubt 
the Bible : having eyes they see not, and having 
ears they hear not, neither do they understand. 
They have lost the use of those divine faculties by 
which alone the Bible may be seen to be the word 
of God. The blind man has no correct knowledge 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 179 

of colors, nor can you give him any. Perhaps he 
once saw, but his power of vision was marred and 
has fallen into decay. To him there is but one 
color, — his monotonous darkness, which is the 
absence of all colors. He hears his friends speak 
of the bright and many-tinted face of nature, and 
he tries to imagine what they mean. Having the 
use of his hearing, he perhaps likens colors to 
sounds, — says that the red rose is like a bugle 
note, the golden sunset like an organ's tones. 
We who see him, and who love him, pity his mis- 
fortune. He misjudges concerning colors, and 
even doubts that there are any. But his doubt 
proves nothing against them ; it only shows that 
he has lost the power of discerning color. Let his 
sight be restored to him, and he will believe, as 
much as we, in the varied beauty and glory of 
God's works. He knows his defect, and readily 
yields his doubt to those who can see. 

Now you and I, my dear friend, should, in 
judging the Bible, learn to take our defect into 
account. Are there things in it which we cannot 
comprehend, which seem absurd to us, which we 
feel a strong impulse to pronounce untrue ? Let 
not the blind man say, " I see." You know some- 
thing of God, but not the whole. The relation of 
your finiteness to his infinity is such that you 
should expect him to say things which puzzle you. 
If the compass does not seem to you to point the 



180 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

way it should, your wisdom still is in believing it 
right and yourself wrong. You had better believe 
that the sun does rise in the east, even when you 
think it rises in the west, if you would find your 
way out of the woods. It is you, not nature, that 
has been turned round ; you, not what comes from 
God, that is at fault. Wait till you are sure that 
the faculties in you, by which the Bible is to be 
judged, are perfect, before you begin to doubt. 
How many blessed souls there have been, along 
in history, who clung to their beliefs till they out- 
grew their doubts ! They were wise enough to 
charge it to the deficiency in themselves, when 
they saw men as trees walking ; and they clung to 
their beliefs till they outgrew their doubts, till 
they saw spiritual things plainly. Remember, 
dear friend, that our doubt of the Bible grows out 
of our defect; we doubt because our spiritual 
vision is diseased. When the eye of our soul is in 
perfect health, we shall believe with all the heart. 
Devotion to the things of which time and sense 
speak has made men unable to know the things of 
which the Bible speaks. Wait till your spiritual 
deafness is cured, and then say whether or not the 
voice of the Bible is God's voice. 

Worldliness, in which I claim that doubt of the 
Bible begins, has many forms. Nor is that form 
of it which we are wont to consider grossest 
always most damaging to the spiritual faculty in 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 181 

us. You look on the brutal slave of his own appe- 
tites and passions, and you say, K * No wonder that 
he cannot believe the high and pure teachings of 
God's word." He is sunk into a stupid heap of 
animalism. He has in him nothing with which to 
perceive what is divine. Some life like that of 
God must be first kindled in him, and he must be 
lifted into some sort of sympathy with God, or he 
cannot discern what God has said. You look on 
the savage running wild in the woods, and you 
say, " His soul is dwarfed, withered, dead ; he has 
no faculty by which to see that God's message is 
from God." His debasing habits have lowered 
him so near the level of the brute which he hunts 
that he cannot tell God's voice from the voice of a 
man. 

But, perhaps, you look on one who is not sav- 
age, who is not brutal or corrupt in life ; on the 
man whose life is, in the language of the market, 
honest and true, but who is wholly absorbed by 
his own secular affairs. You do not wonder if 
you find him smiling, and waving aside the whole 
solemn concern, when you try a little to bring the 
truths of the Bible to his notice. Why should he 
not do this ? What chance to grow has the appe- 
tency for spiritual things in him ever had? Look 
at his whole life ; — it has been given to material 
pursuits. All that in him which has to do with 
worldliness, with earthly concerns, has been pro- 



182 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOB. 

digiously developed. It has towered up and 
spread abroad, and overshadowed everything 
spiritual in him. His spiritual powers have been 
asleep, have grown weak and puny all the while. 
He has lost all connection with unseen things ; no 
voice out of eternity can make itself heard in his 
dull ear. What wonder, then, when the Bible 
comes to him, if he has no welcome for it? if he 
even doubts whether there be any God to give 
such a book, or any such hereafter, or obligations 
of religion and morality, as it speaks of. His 
doubting of the Bible is no mystery to you, for he 
lacks the faculty with which to believe it. 

But I turn from these instances to that which 
has, perhaps, more than anything else to do with 
present doubts concerning the Bible. Is it any 
wonder, I ask, that the man whose life is devoted to 
material science, and who forgets to keep himself 
all the time in full sympathy with God, sinks at 
length into such lack of true spiritual life as to be 
no longer able to believe that the Bible is God's 
book? His whole energy and enthusiasm are 
turned to the investigation of matter. His sense 
perceptions, his powers of critically observing 
what is visible and tangible, are remarkably 
developed. Losing his interest in everything but 
his chosen studies, what wonder that his faculty 
for knowing religious truth becomes dwarfed, 
torpid, useless, — like the eyes of fishes in caves 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 183 

or the wings of birds that never fly ? Such an one 
may be a master in material science, but spiritual 
things have grown unreal to him. Of course the 
messages of the Bible find no response or wel- 
come in his soul ; he applies to it his materialistic 
tests ; it is to him a book of fables and dreams, 
for it comes out of a world of which he has lost 
all knowledge. Men of this stamp reject the Bible 
as naturally as a blind man does our theories of 
color. 

And when the learned skeptic scatters his 
doubts far and wide through books, papers, and 
magazines, what wonder that they are at once 
welcomed by thousands who, like him, though in 
various ways, are devoted to material pursuits? 
Thus do I account for the fact that not only some 
students of nature, but the masses for whom they 
write and lecture, are sometimes unable to receive 
the Bible as a record of religious truth sent to 
them from God. It is not at all surprising that 
they reject it ; and what they do, so far from 
proving that the Bible is untrue, only shows how 
sadly they have been maimed and blinded in soul, 
— their love of material things wholly absorbing 
them, and the power to see eternal things dormant 
or dead in them. The natural man perceives not 
the things which are of God, for he has not in full 
exercise the faculties by which alone they can be 
discerned. 



184 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

Such being the origin of men's doubts as to the 
truth of the Bible, the way of removing their 
doubts is at once suggested : they do not need to 
be argued with so much as quickened in soul. 
While there is this lack of spiritual life in 
unbelievers, arguments addressed to their reason 
or understanding will hardly persuade them to put 
away their doubts. The arguments which I have 
tried to bring in the foregoing chapters have been 
not so much for them as for those who have some 
spiritual life, — for persons yet young in their 
Christian discipleship, or . just quickened to 
religious inquiry by the Holy Spirit, who are 
more or less troubled and confused by doubts con- 
cerning the Bible, with which the air about them 
is at times filled. 

I have small hope that anything I can say on 
the evidences will be of much use to the devoted 
materialist and the thorough-going worldling, who 
have rejected the Bible. Nor do I believe that 
any human arguments can remove their skepti- 
cism. It is sometimes said, you know, that 
Christians themselves may, by living faithful lives, 
apply the best cure to unbelief. The best possible 
for man to apply, I grant, but still ineffectual. 
The Christian is the world's Bible ; but the world 
often doubts him quite as much as the written 
volume. You know that the worst men, and 
hardest doubters, may live all their lives in imme- 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 185 

diate contact with the best and holiest men. 
Where goodness does not attract it repels. How 
quick the bad are to see the defects in the good, 
and to be influenced by those defects ; just as the}' 
love to dwell on that in the Bible which puzzles 
them, and to make it a reason for rejecting the 
book. The fault is not in the Bible, nor in our 
arguments, nor in the lives of Christians, but in 
those who doubt. They have lost all true and 
simple love — their first love — for religious truth. 
Their whole mind and energy are absorbed by 
material and temporal things ; their spiritual per- 
ceptions have grown weak by disease. The 
remedy must reach the disease. Spiritual health, 
such as men begin to get when they are born 
again of the Spirit of God, is their first great 
need. 

Nothing will ever induce men to receive the 
Bible, and to love and obey its precepts, while 
this inward quickening is wanting. They will 
doubt, just because it has grown to be natural with 
them to doubt what is unseen and divine. Though 
nothing can be more true than that the Bible is 
God's book, and reveals him to men, they will 
doubt it, just as the blind doubt that there are 
colors, or the deaf that there are sounds. Though 
the Bible should be shown to be as true as the 
axioms of mathematics, they will still doubt, as 
some doubt those axioms. They will not be per- 



186 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

suaded though one should rise from the dead. 
You may show that they need a revelation ; that 
God desires to give them one, and has full power 
to give it ; that the Bible claims to be his, and is 
such a message as we should expect from him ; that 
contemporary history and the fulfilment of pro- 
phecy, and what the Bible has done in the world, 
mate good its claims, — all this and much more 
you may show ; but what is it to those who, having 
eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, and who 
do not understand? The argument which they 
need must begin within them, in the quickening of 
their spiritual perceptions, in their dying to the 
world and being made alive to God. 

The question is sometimes raised, whether the 
more conspicuous of those who doubt the Bible are 
of a higher order of mind than those who believe 
it. I do not think they are higher or as high. 
The imperial minds of our race who have known 
the Bible — the Leibnitzes, the Pascals, the 
Shakespeares, the Bacons, the Edwardses, and 
Websters — have been implicit believers in its 
divine authority. 

But it is not necessary to disparage the unbe- 
lievers. They may have the very highest intel- 
lectual gifts, yet, being wholly given up to mate- 
rial things, or studying religion mainly as a mere 
theory, they are more powerless than the unwise 
and unlearned to receive the Bible as God's word 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 187 

to his own children about eternal things. Their 
prodigious growth in philosophy, in criticism, in 
curious speculation, has only the more effectually 
killed in them those childlike soul-perceptions by 
which God and his word may be truly known. If 
you go far back in history, and walk down be- 
tween the two ranks, the doubters on the one hand, 
and the believers on the other, you may accord 
equal natural powers to them all ; those in one of 
the ranks doubt because only that side of them 
which is toward this world has been developed, 
those in the other line believe because the faculties 
in them which are fitted to lay hold of God and his 
truth are healthy and full-grown. 

You go to such men as Pascal or Edwards, and 
you cannot possibly make them doubt that the 
Bible is God's book ; they know it is from the 
way in which it speaks of God and his kingdom. 
There have been millions, — the loftiest men and 
the humblest, the greatest and the least, — who, 
by faith, dwelt in that kingdom. They walked 
with God, and their conversation was in heaven. 
To them nothing else could be so true as the Bible, 
since it gave a ground for their own experience, it 
spoke back to them what they were deeply con- 
scious of. They had seen the King in his beauty, 
the land that is very far off; and the book which 
came to them out of that land, with the King's seal 
upon it, was no fable, no dream, but the yea and 



188 HOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

amen to what they had most deeply known and 
felt in their souls. The eagerness with which such 
men have received the Bible, and laid it away in 
their hearts, and gloried in it as the truth of 
truths, will be shared by you and me, dear friend, 
as those faculties in us by which we apprehend 
religious truth come out from their bondage to 
things seen, and are renewed and made to grow 
up towards a perfect man in Christ Jesus. When 
we are dead to the world, and alive to God, we 
shall see that the Bible is wholly and divinely 
true. 

This quickening and renewal, this regeneration, 
this unfolding of your spiritual faculties into the 
full likeness of God, is what I first and most 
desire for you, dear friend. There are some, yea, 
I trust, many, things in the Bible which you can 
already see to be wondrously true. Let this be a 
sign to you that your spiritual perceptions, how- 
ever neglected or abused, are not yet wholly dead. 
Though they seem to you at times to live a feeble 
and flickering life, Christ has come that you might 
have life more abundantly. Quench not the 
Spirit, and then you will not despise prophesy- 
ings. It is necessary, in order that you may find 
God and eternal life in the Bible, that you should 
be born again, — not of blood, nor of the will 
of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 
If you grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, who 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 189 

comes to work this glorious work in you, he will 
seal you unto the day of redemption, and will 
open to you the divine meaning of Scripture. 
You shall have the mind of Christ. You shall 
receive that spirit by which all things, even the 
deep things of God, are perceived. 

But not all at once shall the glory burst on you 
out of the divine book. First the blade, then the 
ear, after that the full corn in the ear, — a gradual 
process of knowing, answering to the process of 
renewal going on within you. You find a little 
spot cleared for you in the vast forest of doubt ; 
there pitch your tent. Do not stray away into 
the surrounding woods, and lose yourself in their 
tangled depths, but enlarge the bounds of your 
clearing. Try to know what is mysterious in 
God's word only as you are sure that you study 
it for duty's sake, and with the light of his coun- 
tenance falling around you. Your first wisdom 
consists in reducing to practice what you already 
know, and your next wisdom in seeking to know 
more only that you may improve your practice. 
They shall learn of Christ who follow him. 
Those who do his will shall know of the doctrine. 
You already see something, though but darkly, as 
in a glass ; yet, if you are true to that present 
light, the day is coming when you shall see face to 
face. Though from him that hath not shall be 
taken away what he hath, to him that hath shall 



190 NOT OF MAN, BUT OF GOD. 

be given, and he shall have abundance. If you 
are false to so much of the Bible as you can now 
believe, you will at length doubt the whole ; but if 
you are true to it, the whole of the blessed volume 
shall be made clear as the noonday to you. You 
may not understand it while in the flesh, but in 
the brighter day which is coming, the Lamb in 
the midst of the throne shall take it, and shall un- 
loose to you its seals. Turn away from the light 
which you now see in God's word, and there will 
be left in it but the blackness of darkness for you ; 
follow that light and it shall lead you forth into a 
boundless and resplendent day. 

Not outwardly, along the thorny paths of human 
speculation, but within you, in the cry of your 
spirit and God's answer thereto, must you search 
for the well of water which springs up into ever- 
lasting life : — 

u Came North and South and East and West, 
Four sages, to a mountain crest, 
Each pledged to search the wide world round 
Until the wondrous well be found. 

" Before a crag they made their seat, 
Pure bubbling waters at their feet. 
Said one, This well is small and mean, 
Too petty for a village green ! 
Another said, So small and dumb, 
From earth's deep centre can it come ? 
The third, This water seems not rare, 
Not even bright, but pale as air! 



WHY SOME MEN DOUBT THE BIBLE. 191 

The fourth, Thick crowds I looked to see ; 
Where the true well is these must be. 

" They rose and left the mountain crest, — 
One Xorth, one South, one East, one West; 
O'er many seas and deserts wide 
They wandered, thirsting, till they died. 

"The simple shepherds by the mountain dwell, 
And dip their pitchers in the wondrous well." 



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